Harnessing the Power of Deliberate Practice in Language Teacher Education: An Exemplary Instructional Module

ABSTRACT Despite its centrality to practice‐based teacher education, in addition to its exciting affordances for generating meaningful learning‐to‐teach experiences, the construct of deliberate practice has not yet received much attention in the scholarly literature on language teacher preparation. In this concept‐based practice feature, the author describes an instructional module targeting the skill of giving directions that was framed by tenets associated with deliberate practice theory, designed for an asynchronous language teaching methods course. The module begins with common activities like a reading and group analysis of a video and ends with a video‐recorded enactment that provides students with the opportunity to practice new strategies as well as retry previously exercised ones that have not yet been mastered. The paper concludes with reflections on the sample module, highlighting ways in which its asynchronous nature facilitates the practice‐based rehearsals process and indicating avenues for future research, notably as it relates to the rank order of teaching strategies addressed in language teacher preparation programs.