As more than 100 countries prepare to celebrate World Teacher’s Day Monday, a new collection on innovative education practices, International Perspectives on English Language Teacher Education: Innovations from the Field, offers some valuable perspectives on English Language teaching and teacher training.

The theme for World Teacher’s Day this year—“empowering teachers, building sustainable societies”— resonates with the editor of the collection, Thomas Farrell, a professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at Brock University.

For Farrell, empowering teachers has been a lifelong mission, stretching back to his own experiences as an ESL teacher in the 1970s. He went on to train ESL teachers in Korea and Singapore before coming to Brock 12 years ago.

Sustainability, a key issue in Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) training, is also central to Farrell’s research. In spite of the high demand for English language teachers around the world, roughly 50 per cent of novice TESOL teachers leave the profession within three to five years. Farrell believes that attrition rates can be reduced or even eliminated if the innovations outlined in this collection are adopted or adapted by other educators who want to help prepare ESL teachers for the reality of what they will face in their classrooms.

Thomas Farrell

Many of the innovations centre around collaboration and reflective practice. Farrell, whose ongoing research on reflective practice and novice ESL teacher experience is currently funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant, was not surprised to see this theme emerge.

“Teacher educators from Canada to New Zealand to Singapore to Australia to South Africa saw the need to encourage and promote reflective practice for ESL teachers,” Farrell points out. “Teachers can become more empowered by engaging in reflective practice to examine their philosophy, beliefs, values, theories, principles and classroom practices so that they can become and remain effective teachers.”

International Perspectives on English Language Teacher Education: Innovations from the Field was published by Palgrave Macmillan in June of 2015.