This paper focuses on the quality assessment of languages teachers' post-graduate courses at the university of aveiro, portugal. The training environment in these courses seems to be particularly propitious for the development of interactions between didactitians/researchers' and teachers' communities, who often evolve in parallel paths. Situated within a didactics epistemology that perceives the connections between teacher education, educational research and teacher practice as fertile ground for the development of this new knowledge area (canha, 2001; everton et al, 2000; sillam, 2002), this study was preceded by another (araújo e sá, m. H. & costa, n. & canha, m.b.q. & alarcão, i., 2002) whose aim was to evaluate the impact of the mentioned post-graduation course (that integrates a clear research component) on teachers' practices. In order to capture teachers' perspectives, in this preliminary study, we applied questionnaires to the subjects. The outcomes revealed that the impact perceived by the master teachers was limited to their own professional development, which was scarcely shared with their peers. Thus, the need to promote the consolidation of closer bonds between researchers' and teachers' communities was evident. It became clear that the design of new courses should include strategically planned new modalities of teacher practices' improvement. Following this preliminary study's suggestions, we have decided to focus on the perspectives of other participant subjects: the teachers responsible for the disciplines in the course curriculum, the theses supervisors and the course coordinators. Our aim this time was to better understand the ways in which the interaction between research, teacher education and teaching practice (seen as a supporting platform for the development of collaboration cultures between researchers' and teachers' universes of reference) underlies their intervention. We used data collected from two types of sources: - the programmes of the disciplines in the compulsory curriculum of the most recent (200/2002) post-graduate course edition; - interviews conducted with the teachers of those disciplines, the theses supervisors and the course coordinators. the qualitative data analysis, using document and content analysis techniques, emphasised the presence of an unclear strategic thought, in terms of the implications of the connections between research in didactics, curricular didactics and professional didactics (alarcão, 1994). Thus, the outcomes suggest the pertinence of developing devices that, conveying a strategic intentionality to those connections, stimulate the improvement of collaborative cultures regarded as fundament for the development of both professional practices and didactic scientific knowledge (day, 1997; lieberman, 2000).