Professional isolation, a familiar issue in world language education, has been exacerbated by the COVID‐19 pandemic. This article addresses this issue by providing world language educators with practical guidance related to establishing high‐functioning professional networks online. Empirical findings related to computer‐mediated communication (CMC) in language learning and teacher training contexts support the articulation of four critical considerations for successful online professional communities: that participants (a) possess requisite technical knowledge to navigate the platforms being utilized; (b) develop requisite reflective and evaluative competencies; (c) exhibit ongoing, sustained engagement; and (d) engage collaboratively with other participants. In concert, successful treatment of these considerations not only provides practitioners with a temporary solution to engage in physically distant collaboration, but also may help establish a more robust, sustainable professional development infrastructure for world language teachers in the future.

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While teacher education is a crucial element to ensuring that second language (L2) pragmatics gains traction in classrooms and curricula, it would appear that teacher development programs provide only modest focus in this area. This chapter reports on findings from a preliminary case study in which three Spanish teachers accessed an asynchronous teacher education online module aimed at heightening their awareness of L2 pragmatics and the important role that it can play in language instruction. The results indicate that asynchronous professional development (PD) materials provide teachers with resources which they can access conveniently for the purpose of gaining insights into lesson sequencing, identification of key content and development of strategies for teaching L2 pragmatics in the classroom.

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Online platforms have the potential to address the issue of world language teacher attrition by building professional learning communities. However, autonomous engagement is not guaranteed by the mere existence of said tools. In this article, we report findings from Catalyst user data analysis. Catalyst is an online professional development social portfolio that connects users to other professionals (in groups and as individuals). Specifically, we examine user behavior patterns in six areas—Group Membership, Goals, Evidence, Connections, Reflections, and Comments. Each feature was chosen because of its potential usefulness in facilitating meaningful and integrative participation in online professional platforms. Results reveal three behavior profiles: 1-Testers, 2-Dabblers, and 3-Embracers. Each profile exhibits unique behaviors of engagement with the portfolio. Users who did not join any group were much more likely to show the lowest level of activity (i.e., Testers), while those who were part of a group and had more connections (i.e., Embracers) demonstrated the highest level of activity. These results support the theoretical foundation for sociocultural approaches to professional learning for teachers (e.g., Kabilan et al., 2011; Kabilan & Kahn, 2012; Kitade, 2014) and highlight the critical, and mutually reciprocal, relationship between social engagement and cognitive development.