A Model for Developing the Language Skills of Future Foreign Language Teachers

Abstract

Future teachers of English often develop listening, speaking, reading and writing in separate courses, while the transfer of these skills into giving instructions, explaining, questioning and providing feedback is left to the practicum. Models developed in the region usually describe the outcome as a complex professional-communicative competence in which the development of individual skills is no longer visible. The article presents a model for developing the language skills of future foreign language teachers that preserves the specific mechanisms of the four skills, integrates them functionally and transfers them into teachers’ language actions. The model was constructed by theoretical modelling within a doctoral project: requirements were derived from a comparative analysis of foreign, regional and national experience; approaches and principles were synthesised from research on teacher language, skills integration, practice-based teacher education and reflection; and the components were specified to the level of stages, learning environments and evidence. The model consists of target-conceptual, content-functional, procedural-technological and evaluative-resultative blocks. Its central mechanism is the chain “pedagogical task – didactic decision – language action”, through which each skill acquires a teaching function. Five cyclical stages (diagnostic, differentiated development, functional integration, professional-pedagogical application and reflective evaluation) connect classroom work, independent study, simulated teaching and the practicum, and outcomes are assessed separately as language results and as pedagogical performance. Treating classroom language as the functional use of the four skills allows teacher educators to locate the source of a student’s difficulty and to plan the next learning cycle accordingly.