Metalinguistic reasoning in teacher education: contrasting formation pathways in L2/L3 pre-service teachers

Calls to foreground linguistic understanding as powerful knowledge raise a pressing question for teacher education: how do future L2/L3 teachers mobilise metalinguistic reasoning in ways that matter for classroom practice? This article contrasts two formation pathways: (a) pre-service teachers whose academic preparation is in the philology of their L2/L3 (the traditional, discipline-anchored study encompassing linguistic and literary dimensions), and (b) career-change entrants with high-level L2/L3 proficiency but more limited formal study of linguistic analysis and metalanguage. Framing linguistic reasoning as the disciplined organisation of knowledge to describe, compare, and explain linguistic phenomena, the study examines differences in the repertoires of (meta)concepts, the handling of thresholds and misconceptions, and the epistemic stances that underpin claims (e.g., rule-based, usage-based, or register-sensitive justifications). The findings suggest that these divergent formations shape the precision and teachability of explanations, the translation of disciplinary terms into pupil-facing language, and responsiveness to counter-examples and genre variation. The article outlines implications for programmes seeking to cultivate subject-­specific reasoning: bridging disciplinary metalanguage with pedagogic clarity, legitimising diverse evidential sources, and designing encounters with threshold concepts that enable future L2/L3 teachers to develop more robust linguistic explanations of linguistic phenomena.