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Research needs in foreign language teacher education: Insights from researchers in Poland, Portugal, and Turkey

Language teacher education (LTE) is a dynamic field which needs to keep abreast of the changes in other fields and the teacher-oriented developments. In the 21st century, teacher education is required to meet the expectations of the pre-/in-service teachers, the learners, the technology, and the changing qualifications. In this sense, it is fundamental to investigate how the research trends in LTE should be shaped with a bottom-up perspective. To this end, the current study aims to investigate the needs of academics and researchers in the field of LTE in a variety of contexts (i.e., Turkey, Portugal, and Poland). The study was conducted as a part of an Erasmus+ Project called ILTERG (International Language Teacher Education Research Group) co-funded by the Turkish National Agency and Erasmus+ Program. A total number of 139 participants from three countries participated in the study. The data were collected through a needs analysis survey and semi-structured interviews. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data revealed that all items in the survey might be guiding for the academics to conduct research on. The list of the research topics could guide novice and/or expert researchers to conduct further studies in LTE. practical implementation of at secondary longitudinal studies


Introduction
The basic and the most straightforward interpretations of language teacher education (LTE) programs cover only some key points about the components of LTE.
An example of this understanding can easily be seen in Freeman and Johnson's (1998) definition of LTE; as they stated, "learning to teach is a long-term complex are not applied to the daily realities. Johnson (2013) notes this major challenge in LTE programs and gives the big responsibility to the LTE programs so that these programs connect the theoretical concepts to everyday concepts of teaching along with concrete practical activities. The examples that display the gap between theory and practice in LTE can be expanded; however, investigating this gap is not the major concern of this study. Instead, examining the research needs within LTE is considered to act as a pioneer in the field of foreign language teacher education by inspiring new research areas and presenting views from teacher educators about the highly and moderately preferred research topics.
Revealing the research needs is believed to contribute to more studies in LTE which combine theory and practice. The importance and originality of this study are that the needs analysis survey has been conducted among language teacher educators and practitioners doing their post-graduate studies in language teacher education in three countries; Poland, Portuguese and Turkey. Furthermore, the views of three teacher educators from each country have been taken in order to gain insights about the highly and moderately preferred research topics and to understand current portrait in LTE. In particular, no study, to our knowledge, has considered revealing the research needs in the field of foreign language teacher education by examining three different countries, which also makes this study significant.

Literature Review
When the literature is examined thoroughly, it is observed that the first research topics about foreign LTE were drawn from "general education"; and therefore, the educational activities emerged as classroom observation, teaching young learners, action research, observation and supervision, language awareness, mentoring in the late 20 th century (Wright, 2010). As mentioned before, these research topics have found their way to new and more influential trends in the 21 st century.
The reflective practice flourished as one of the widely investigated research topics. Reflection, initially introduced by Schön (1983;1987), then elaborated by Research needs in foreign language teacher education: Insights from researchers in Poland, Portugal, and Turkey 4 Barlett (1990) and Wallace (1991), leads to ST's' development of independent judgement and practical theory; thus, it has a substantial contribution to foreign language teaching education. The significant role of reflective practice is also highlighted by Richards (2004) reporting that the shift from behaviorism to constructivism enabled teachers to become reflective practitioners who could form their own working theory. In this regard, Farrell (2018) yields that reflection and reflective practice has been at the core of major innovations in LTE. Through reflective practice, STs act as active mediators of their own learning so that they take the responsibility of their development in their teaching career. Furthermore, by combining reflective practice with other research areas, El-Dib (2007) integrates reflective thinking and action research during a period of teaching practice on an Egyptian foreign language teaching undergraduate program. To examine the levels of reflective thinking, El-Dib (2007) constructs a three-part procedure of action research and reflective-planning, acting, and reviewing. The data displays that 50 percent of STs were only capable of 'low-level reflection'. The conclusion drawn by the researcher is that lack of awareness of the complexity of problems encountered in the classroom and lack of vision of their work as prospective teachers result in low-level reflection. Thus, in LTE programs, there is too much focus on 'foundations of education' and teaching methods, strategies, and techniques, which allocates little time for reflective thinking (El-Dib, 2007).
The existing research about the use of the reflective practice in LTE has been mostly carried out with STs. Some studies demonstrate that STs benefit from reflective practice as they explore their weaknesses and strengths (Lee, 2007;Luk, 2008;Yeşilbursa, 2011) whereas Akbari (2007) yields that reflective practice is not appropriate for this group as STs are at the early stages of their career, and they are more concerned about self-image and approval by their mentors.
Continuous professional development (CPD), another key topic, plays a major role in LTE research. Language teachers engage in CPD activities in various ways. Richards and Farrell (2005) emphasize that CPD has long-term goals such as realizing the process of language development, understanding the changing teachers' roles, being able to make decisions during lessons, examining one's own theories and 2020, 6(2) The Literacy Trek 5 principles of language teaching, developing an understanding of different teaching styles, and understanding learners' perceptions about classroom activities.
Conducting research and developing inquiry skills might be efficient tools for CPD. For instance, Matei (2002) examines the experience of introducing a group of Romanian undergraduate STs to classroom research as an experimental part of their teacher education program. STs report that researching with students in classrooms made them both reflective and realistic. Matei (2002) and her students finished the process by attending an international conference and giving joint presentations about their research. This stage was so significant as the STs not only engaged in the professional community of language teachers and researchers but also started their professional development journey being a member of the international community of language teachers. A similar study was conducted by Jones (2004) with a group of Australian undergraduate students in the LTE program. Participants report that they benefited from engaging in teacher research since the theoretical issues taught at the teacher education program became relevant as they worked with real learners in real classrooms. One can draw two conclusions from the studies where STs engage with teacher research. First, if CPD is a long process, STs take their initial steps into this long journey under the supervision of their teacher educators. Second, they get accustomed to making critical reflection about real classrooms, their research, and their projects. Based on the literature in reflective teaching and CPD, it is easily recognized that research about these two topics is interrelated and interconnected. Crandall (2000) supports this view by claiming that reflection and teacher inquiry are now regarded as important to the development of language teaching theory and appropriate LTE. Another study supporting this view was carried out with 217 English language teachers (Wichadee, 2012). This study illuminates that reflective practice plays a significant role in CPD as participants report that they have benefited from the reflective discussions with other colleagues. Therefore, these reflective discussions provide teachers with the opportunity for self-development. Another study which consolidates the positive link between reflection and CPD was conducted by Chien (2013). Participant teachers kept a journal as a reflective practice in Chien's study, and this constant journal keeping enabled teachers to work collaboratively with their colleagues, discuss journal entries, set clear goals, and make suggestions for professional development.
Cooperation and collaboration in professional development are frequently studied in the research of LTE. This collaboration might be both at macro and micro levels; it can be between teachers and mentors, only teachers, school administrators, educational institutions, governments (Bal-Gezegin & Seferoglu, 2019). Novice teachers' and mentors' collaboration has been the focus of some studies. Mann and Tang (2012) reported that the interaction between the mentor teacher and the novice teacher was found to be useful for their professional growth. Meng and Tajaroensuk (2013) investigated the problems that EFL teachers at the tertiary level had during their in-service professional development. Participants highlighted the importance of teamwork and reported that the collaboration of teachers was valuable for growing professionally.
The significant role of technology in CPD has also been viewed for the last decade. Advances in technology have enabled teachers to use technological tools for professional development and even create a new research area called online professional development (Lin, 2015). Teachers are now supported by providing them with opportunities to attend online webinars, workshops, conferences, read academic publications, conduct research via the internet. The influence of virtual settings on teachers' professional development is investigated by other researchers. Kabilan, Adlina, and Embi (2011) found that online sharing and collaboration; engaging in online tasks enriched their profession in diverse ways. Rashid (2018) investigated the impact of dialogic reflections shared on a widely-used social-media platform on teachers' professional growth and concluded that internet sources contributed to the teacher's professional growth.
As mentioned above, reflective practice constitutes the core of major innovations in the area of LTE and the practitioners of reflective teaching did not keep distant to technology and investigated the implications of technology to promote reflective practice. Yang (2009) conducted a study with STs about the use of blogs.
STs critically reflected on their learning process via posting messages on the blog or sending comments on their peers' posts. As a result, participants found this platform useful, enabling them to reflect on their experience and to cooperate with other peers. 2020, 6(2) The Literacy Trek 7 Video-recorded lessons are considered as valuable tools to foster reflection (Baecher et al., 2013;Eröz-Tuğa, 2013;Susoy, 2015).
Inquiring teacher beliefs has been another major research topic among LTE researchers. Crandall (2000) states that STs' prior knowledge; in other words, the influence of prior teacher educators and their beliefs have a profound impact on their conceptions of teaching and learning. Therefore, the teacher constructs his/her 'teaching beliefs', blending what s/he has experienced as a student and trainee and what s/he explores as a prospective teacher. In this regard, Gray (2004) contributes to this discussion, analyzing a different angle. An experienced teacher accumulates craft knowledge during his career; however, this knowledge cannot simply be learned in lectures, but it has to be 'explored'. The researcher attempts to outline how teachers' awareness is raised on a one-year postgraduate LTE program in the UK. The study involves a series of procedures such as reading published narrations which layout teacher knowledge, observation and discussion, planning, discussions of teaching dilemmas, and video recorded micro teachings and student research projects. She also supports this procedure by sharing her lesson planning and then teaching live classes, recording her immediate responses to incidents that happened in the classroom, and discussing these with STs. She also concludes that acquiring this craft knowledge is difficult, and all the mentioned procedures require the cooperation of a skillful teacher educator.
It is known that teachers are not merely responsible for fulfilling attained procedural tasks but are constantly thinking, making decisions, and solving problems.
Constructivist teacher education, at this point, enables teachers to become aware of their own beliefs about the teaching process, make reflections on experience and collaborate with other teachers, take active roles in the decision-making process. That is why teacher beliefs and teacher cognition have expanded and brought about new intriguing research areas like teacher identity (De Costa & Norton, 2017) and teacher agency (Husu & Toom, 2008;Pyhältö, Pietarinen, & Soini, 2015).
The concepts which have been the major research topics in LTE literature have been extensively studied in practicum context. Practicum teaching is the first authentic context where STs engage with the teaching procedure in the real work Research needs in foreign language teacher education: Insights from researchers in Poland, Portugal, and Turkey 8 community. It is the place where they attempt to bridge the gap between theoretical teacher education and classroom realities for the first time (Eröz-Tuğa;Susoy, 2015). Furthermore, the essential roles of teachers as materials developer, decision maker, problem solver (Richards, 1990) has resulted in a need for teacher education programs that provide prospective teachers with the actual practice of the abovementioned skills. The study conducted by Richards and Crookes (1988) presents the longstanding tradition at practicum teaching. They examined many LTE programs and found that 75 percent of programs involved observing experienced teachers or peers, being observed by supervisors or mentor teachers, being responsible for classroom management, while also offering mentor teachers an opportunity to learn from their new colleagues (Stoynoff, 1999). A recent study that investigates the sense of professional teacher agency of TTs reports that the implementation of practicum teaching varies according to the country and educational context (Yakışık, Fişne, & Ekşi, 2019) as STs confront various constraints and challenges as a consequence of resources and opportunities at their teaching contexts. The length of the practicum teaching, age of the participants, task contents play significant roles in STs' agentic behaviours.
The literature above partly portraits the studies done in the field of foreign LTE, all of which is guiding to investigate the research aims of the current study.
There has been a growing interest in LTE research. Thus, the studies might broaden our knowledge of practice; however, as Wright (2010) states, 'we need to learn more about the effects of our practice in second LTE' (p. 289). In this way, the real contribution of LTE to the quality of language teaching can be observed, and the big issue of theory and practice divide in LTE can be resolved; thus, the innovative reflections of research can be facilitated in realities of classroom practice.

Aim of the study
With the changing demands and competencies in teacher qualifications and the rise of the 21st skills, the research trends in LTE need updates and revision. To the best of our knowledge, there is no previous study to shed light on the viewpoints of the academics to explore the research topics with a bottom-up approach in different countries. In this regard, the current study aims to investigate the needs of academics and researchers in the field of LTE in a variety of contexts (Turkey, Poland, and 2020, 6(2) The Literacy Trek 9 Portugal) and to explore the opinions of researchers in LTE in terms of current implementations on choosing research topics and sharing their suggestions for further studies. The study was conducted as a part of an Erasmus+ project called ILTERG (International Language Teacher Education Research Group) co-funded by the Turkish National Agency and Erasmus+ Program, which aims to promote the interaction among the international research groups in line with social and scientific advancements. The study is significant in the field of LTE as it aims to present a descriptive picture of the research needs of the LTE from different contexts in three countries, which can guide novice and/or expert researchers to conduct further studies in LTE. Moreover, the study is also significant as it explores the opinions of the researchers and TEs on choosing research topics to contribute to LTE field through the discussions held in context-specific aspects.

Research Context
The study was one of the outputs of an Erasmus+ Project called ILTERG In Turkey, in order to become an English language teacher, one has to complete a Bachelor's degree (1st cycle) in an ELT programme. However, it is also possible for graduates from programmes such as English Literature, American Literature, and Linguistics to become teachers through a master's program in ELT without a thesis. Additionally, graduates or undergraduates of these programmes can attain the certificate of English language teaching after getting pedagogical training, which is also called pedagogical formation course, offered by Faculties of Education at some qualified universities. The research setting for data collection of this study was the universities in Turkey which offer the 1st (Bachelor of Art), 2nd (Master of Art), and 3rd cycle degrees (Doctorate) of LTE programmes.
In Poland, the graduates of a Bachelor's degree (1st cycle) from an LTE program can become an English language teacher in a primary school. Also, to be a qualified teacher in all types of schools (primary, secondary, or higher), it is necessary to have a Master's degree (2nd cycle). The data collected from Poland include the universities which have degrees at the Bachelor's and Master's levels in LTE.
Furthermore, to become an English language teacher in Portugal, one needs to complete a master's degree (2nd cycle) in the field. The institutions for data collection of the study provide 1st (Bachelor of Art), 2nd (Master of Art), and 3rd cycle degrees (Doctorate). In Portugal, there are two different Master's programmes: (i) for Primary education (Year 3 and 4) and (ii) for Basic (Year 7-9) and Secondary (10-12) education.
The similarity of LTE programmes in Poland, Portugal and Turkey is that they all provide linguistic and teacher education specialized classes. Besides, STs are engaged in practicum experience in their teacher education studies. In practicum teaching, both 'school experience' and 'teaching experience' courses are implemented within teacher education programmes in three countries.

Participants
Since the study is conducted as part of a project, purposeful sampling was used. Purposeful sampling is a technique widely used in qualitative research for the identification and selection of information-rich cases for the most effective use of limited resources (Patton, 2015). With this sampling, the researcher can select participants and research contexts that are representative and associated with the phenomenon and research problem being studied (Creswell, 2007).
A total number of 139 participants (74.1 % female and 25.9 % male) took part in the study. The age range of the participants is a large one from the twenties to the 2020, 6(2) The Literacy Trek 11 sixties. In particular, the majority of them (88%) are aged between 25 and 59 years.
The study was conducted in three countries, which are Turkey, Poland, and Portugal.
Thus, regarding the nationalities and contexts, 51 % of the participants were Turkish, 23 % were Polish, 17 % were 24 Portuguese, and 9% of the researchers were from other nationalities such as Italian and American. As for the educational background, 118 researchers, who took this survey, have an MA or Ph.D. degree. The researchers have different academic positions (research assistants, lecturers, assistant professors, associate professors, and professors) at their university. The researchers vary in national/international publications. Nearly half of them (48.2%) have a maximum five publications, whereas 35 participants (%27.2%) have sixteen or more publications.
With regard to courses taught at the BA level, the researchers mostly lecture language skills-based courses, teacher training, and methodology courses. At the MA and Ph.D. levels, the researchers mostly lecture language teaching methodology, teacher training, and language skills-based course in a similar way. When the participants were asked about how they define themselves such as researcher, language teacher and teacher trainer (they can choose more than one), mostly they preferred to choose researcher (69.1%), and language teacher (60.4%) and then language teacher trainer (51.8%)

Data Collection Instruments
In order to explore the research needs of the academics and researchers in LTE, both quantitative and qualitative data collection instruments were used. For quantitative data collection, a needs analysis survey was applied to teacher trainers and researchers in LTE. For more depth discussion, semi-guided interviews were conducted to collect qualitative data.

Needs Analysis Survey
In an educational framework, needs analysis is defined as a process that determines the needs of a learner or a group of learners and arranging the needs based on their priorities (Richards & Platt, 1992). As also suggested by Nunan (1998), needs analysis is a starting point of the design of a syllabus or a curriculum which caters to the needs of different stakeholders (e.g., teachers, learners, administrators). Similarly, elements of the target situation. With these affordances of the use of needs analysis, the current study chose a needs analysis survey as an instrument to collect the data with a bottom-up approach. The development of the needs analysis survey for the current study is illustrated in Figure 1.

Interviews
In order to expand the data and elaborate on the research aim of the study, semi-structured interviews were held. Among the respondents of the needs analysis survey, 3 TEs or researchers from each context (Poland, Portugal, and Turkey) were asked to discuss on the findings of the needs analysis survey (the higher and lower needed research topics, the possible reasons, their own ideas on these findings). The questions were sent to the participants by email and the participants were asked to reply back in written format. Meanwhile, the participants were also informed that they could contact with the researchers for possible lack of understanding.

Data Analysis
The quantitative data of the study were collected through a needs analysis survey, which is a 5-Likert scale. A total of 23 items included in the survey were related to identifying the areas that the researchers think require more research in LTE. Reliability coefficients (Cronbach Alpha) of the scale were .85, which indicated good reliability. The participants were asked to grade according to the degrees of the necessity for further research. Descriptive statistics (e.g., frequency analysis, mean, standard deviation) and cluster analysis were applied to identify which research areas were found necessary. In light of the results of the descriptive statistics, three experts in the field categorized the findings for a better presentation of the data. The categories were named as very high, high and moderate level according to the cut-off points decided by the experts.
For the qualitative analysis of nine interviews, content analysis, a type of qualitative analysis including coding for themes, searching patterns, and making interpretations to draw conclusions (Ellis & Barkhuizen, 2005), was used to gather the common themes. For the reliability issue, two coders read each interview of the same TE and compared their themes in order to discuss disagreements and develop a shared coding scheme. They worked together throughout the coding. The findings of the qualitative data were supported with significant quotations and analysed to enhance the quantitative results.

Results and Discussion
According to cluster analysis and mean scores (above 3.00), all research topics in the survey were found necessary to conduct further research in LTE. In other words, all items were specified necessary by the academics to explore more for the field of LTE. However, to investigate the research aims more in-depth, three experts The results are supported by the extracts from the interviews to provide more insights. As given in the appendix, the interviews were held around the discussion of the items that were found very high and moderate level of research need. Due to the number of research items (n=23) in the survey, the qualitative data and the extracts to support the findings were limited to the most and the least needed areas. Moreover, the discussion of the findings were meant to focus on the overall picture of the findings and particular research items since each and every research item in the survey (n=23) is a wide research area, and thus it is not possible to discuss all of the research topics in the current study, which is not the scope of the study as well. Since the main aim of the study is to investigate to investigate the needs of academics and researchers in the field of LTE in a variety of contexts (Turkey, Portugal, and Poland), the findings of the needs analysis survey were presented and discussed below through three main categories of level of needs. teacher competencies and standardization were found considerably more necessary to be studied upon.

2020, 6(2)
The Literacy Trek Furthermore, in interviews, the academics stated the possible reasons for this finding by highlighting more practice-oriented aspects of these topics. The researchers discussed that CPD, practicum, classroom interaction and teacher competencies were mostly related to the practical dimension of LTE. Therefore, it can be concluded from the findings that in LTE field, more research is needed towards the path of teaching practice for improving LTE field, which might also shed further light on the theoretical aspects of LTE. Also, the interviewees shared similar opinions while interpreting this finding. In order to expand this discussion, the following excerpts from a researcher from Portugal and one from Poland illustrate this finding: In fact, the topics that received the highest interest in the needs analysis survey seem to prove my belief, given that they are largely concerned with teachers' real-life endeavours and tasks.

R6 Portugal
All of these topics have a more practical dimension than the ones less popular in this needs analysis. It means that researching these topics may contribute to obtaining practical implications both for the researchers who have to didactic classes with students as well as their students with whom they can share their newly researched knowledge.

R3 Poland
The results in Table 1 yield that CPD has the highest interest among the researchers, which also supports the recent research trends of literature in the field.
CPD covers several aspects of improving teacher competencies, as stated below, with an extract.
Professional development is very often emphasised on the methodology of foreign language teaching courses. Due to various processes, such as language attrition, teacher burnout, it seems to be very important to help in-service teachers improve their competencies.

R1 Poland
Moreover, practicum is a topic that interests several researchers. Researchers below discuss that practicum has a significant role in LTE in order to cultivate STs for their future classrooms. In this line, Öztürk and Aydın (2019) list the lack of feedback and practice in LTE programs as one of the common problems confronted in preservice teacher education.
Practicum contributes to success or failure in foreign language teaching, and practicum experience may influence, to a great extent, pre-service teachers' perception of the profession.

R1 Poland
Practicum plays a leading role in LTE research. It is a wide area where many teaching components can be investigated. Student teachers can be observed in terms of teacher motivation, agency, identity, practical knowledge, use of reflective practice, use of lesson plan, giving instructions; the behaviors of mentor teachers can be investigated in terms of observation and feedback.

R9 Turkey
Another result is that the research on classroom interaction is also highly needed. In this sense, Sert (2019) also highlights that classroom interaction studies are to be conducted more to increase awareness of the relationships between interaction and learning, to provide teachers with tools to utilize classroom interaction into teacher education, and to follow the change in teaching practices in time.
The last highly needed area is teacher competencies and standardization. The researcher from Turkey stresses the significance of this topic in detail.
I think the high score given for teaching competencies and standardization might stem from the desire to make the teaching standards equal or nearly equal in many teaching contexts. My personal belief is that teaching quality is so essential that many teachers experience the feeling of learned helplessness as they need to cope with under-motivated learners in their classes, especially at vocational high schools in Turkey. I believe these teachers are caught in the wind of despair, and they believe it is too late to reverse things back as these learners lost their interest in language learning before attending vocational high schools.

R9 Turkey
These findings might also be interpreted in line with a study by Demir and Koçyiğit (2018) about a systematic review of research on English LTE between 1997 and 2016 in three flagship journals. They found that teacher identity, professional development, teacher/learner variables, teaching and learning issues and teacher roles were the top five popular themes in terms of recent research trends. Thus, professional development as a research topic has been popular for the last two decades. However, the current study reveals that the academics in the field still suggest more studies are needed in professional development of language teachers. 2020, 6(2)

The Literacy Trek
Furthermore, the findings of the survey also indicate that a significant amount of research topics (n=15) were found "high level" of need for further research. Table   2 below presents the research areas which have significant potential to study more. Since it is not reasonable to go into details of all these research topics in this study, the results can be discussed in light of the recent studies on these topics. For example, as the review of the literature also highlights, technology integration in LTE is increasingly needed. Lightfoot (2019)  However, it is argued that teacher educators are not aware of the nature of the reflection, which require the changes in attitudes to become a reflective practitioner.
Farrell (2018) supports the idea that in LTE, teacher educators should be a role model for reflection by analysing their own teaching practices. In this regard, Wright (2010) acknowledges that LTE should aim to produce reflective teachers through a process integrating socio-cognitive demands to introspect and collaborate with others. Recent publications of TESOL mostly focus on reflective practices in LTE, particularly in the practicum contexts (Farrell, 2018).
The last findings of the study focus on the less but still needed research areas. Table 3 below display that only four research topics were found as a "moderate level" of need for further research. These topics are related to CEFR, L1 use, corpus studies, and literature. To explain the possible reasons behind this finding, some academics assert that these topics are mostly theory-based, as stated in the following excerpts: 2020, 6(2)

The Literacy Trek
It seems that the topics are considered 'theoretical', possibly being more on the 'meta' level. Besides, some topics might still be unknown to the subjects (including the CEFR or corpus linguistics), while others may be uninteresting, such as the use of literature (in light of the dominance of CLIL). R5 Poland Several of the topics above attempt to expand the already existing scientific knowledge base, whereas teachers perhaps need research topics that tackle "real world" questions and attempt to solve problems that teachers experience first-hand in the classroom. R7 Portugal In particular, the interviewees emphasize that corpus studies were not taught and practiced in methodology classes of LTE programmes. Teacher trainers and researchers might not be aware of the potential uses of corpora due to lack of training.
Thus, when compared to other topics, corpus studies were reported as less needed area. The following extracts from each country illustrate the finding better: To a certain extent, I was not surprised at the lower interest of the respondents regarding the use of corpus studies and literature in LTE. Based on my experience as a teacher trainer and through contacting pre-and in-service teachers, I have hardly noticed any interest in those areas. R6 Portugal Corpus is not introduced to us at the pre-service level, nor postgraduate studies. We also did not use it very often to improve our vocabulary knowledge. So, we are not aware of its power and its relation to the language learning approaches and technology. R8 Turkey Although CEFR is a common official document in most European contexts, the researchers were not interested much in this topic. One of the possible reasons, as stated below, can be that there are already several studies on CEFR, or the teacher may consult the document directly without any need for research.
It somehow surprised me due to the amount of research on this topic. Also, I would expect academics and teachers to be aware of the importance the CEFR plays today.

Conclusion
This study aimed at exploring the research needs in the LTE field with the viewpoints of the academics and researchers through a descriptive picture within an Erasmus Project framework. With a needs analysis survey filled by the academics in LTE from Turkey, Portugal, and Poland, a list of research topics was compiled, including a wide array of topics. The quantitative analysis of the survey revealed that all research topics worth investigation. In particular, CPD, classroom interaction, practicum, teacher competencies, and standardization were found as highly needed research topics. On the other hand, topics such as corpus and literature studies, CEFR, and L1 use were found comparatively less needed areas. The interviews conducted with the academics from three countries also shed light on more contextual tendencies on the research topics, their current implementations, and further research suggestions.
In sum, the current study reveals that researchers share similar concerns on choosing research topics for further study although they are from different LTE contexts. Also, some particular research topics were attributed a kind of more level of need, which may guide future researchers in the field. In this regard, it is important to note also that most of the studies focus on attitudes, perceptions and beliefs in LTE and more localness (Kleinsasser, 2013). Thus, future studies should go beyond selfreported data through more data-led, observation-based, and longitudinal studies.
Also, as Kleinsasser (2013) suggests that, with regard to future directions of the research in the field, future researchers need to go beyond borders and boundaries by including citations and practices from around the world.
The study is significant in the sense that it was conducted in three different LTE contexts in different countries. Moreover, as the literature review suggests, there was no previous study conducted to find out the research needs that are driven out of the viewpoints of the academics in the field. It is hoped that novice or experienced researchers, MA, and Ph.D. students, teacher educators in LTE, gain valuable insights into the ways in which research topics to focus on more.
Although there are several implications stated above, the study has some limitations. The implementation of the survey was limited to the partner universities within the Project. Thus the survey can be conducted to other LTE contexts in different countries. The study is limited to two data collection instruments, a survey, and interviews. Therefore, further studies can be conducted with other instruments (document analysis, field notes, journals).

Burçak Yılmaz Yakışık (Ph.D.) is a lecturer in School of Foreign Languages at Gazi
University, Ankara, Turkey. Her research interests are teacher education, professional teacher agency, individual differences in learning, social interaction in language classes.

Asuman Aşık is an associate professor in the Department of English Language
Teaching at Gazi University, Ankara, Turkey. She is a teacher trainer and a researcher. Her main research areas are language teacher education, technology integration and corpus use in language teaching, and young learners.