The curriculum of English language teacher education in expanding circles: English teachers with the best teaching skills or the ones who are best English proficient?

Abstract

Countries classified as expanding circles have endless worries about the qualities of Teacher Education products. This happened because such expanding circles can never give enough room for English learners to have real-life practices since English is not the lingua franca. Similarly, in Indonesia, the issue of highlighting the qualities of the products of Teacher Education has become an endless problem that never leaves a satisfactory solution. This issue might become a blip in a situation where a new curriculum will be implemented soon. Attempts have been made to increase qualified products of teacher education in Indonesia for years, yet the results are not better than expected. Six domains of content (i.e. theories of teaching, teaching skills, communication skills, subject matter knowledge, pedagogical reasoning and decision making, and context knowledge) presumably might have been used by Indonesian teacher education as the core knowledge base of Second Language Teacher Education (SLTE); however, since Indonesia has various geographical areas which implies various contexts of SLTE, these six domains of content might not be differently adopted in all parts of Indonesia. Highlighting how important all six content domains in the development of Indonesian SLTE are presumably led to how much attention should be paid to each domain. Reviewing these six domains of content, specifically, this article intends to analyze how those domains are synchronized in composing the core content of the English Department curriculum in teacher education. Are they all equally important?