Editorial: Technology-enhanced language teacher education: Opportunities, challenges, and futures

Abstract

This editorial introduces the Special Issue on technology-enhanced language teacher education (LTE), situating current debates and mapping opportunities, challenges, and futures. We clarify what counts as “technology” in LTE (from CALL, MALL, RALL, to virtual platforms and generative AI) and foreground digital literacies, ethics, and equity as preconditions for meaningful integration. The collected articles span conceptual, empirical, and review work: a five-principle framework positioning technology as a partner in reflective practice; teachers’ perspectives on GenAI in Hong Kong classrooms; a reconceptualisation of TPACK that embeds affective knowledge; a bibliometric mapping of GenAI-related LTE scholarship; a critical typology of teachers’ perspectives about AI; and a narrative inquiry into technological triggers of teacher immunity and coping startegies. Together, these contributions recenter teacher agency, identity, and well-being in technology-mediated contexts and argue for context-sensitive, ethically informed design for integrating technology in LTE. We close by outlining research trajectories that prioritise teacher voice, sustained professional learning, and principled, locally responsive uses of AI, globally.