Foreign language teachers: what are we specific in?
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | When talking about teaching (and teachers), both research and policy all over the world have treated it as a generic activity, and teachers as more or less interchangeable parts within a school system. However, it is gradually more and more obvious that if we are to be successful in reforming the nature of curriculum and in raising the quality of education, we must sharpen our understanding of how the subject matters to school teachers. We believe that understanding subject-matter differences among teachers is crucial for the analysis and reform of school teaching. This presentation aims to provide a brief survey of research focusing on the subculture (Grossman & Stodolsky, 1995) of foreign language teachers. Although the history of foreign language teaching goes back to the ancient times, it is only in the last decades that researchers reflected the needs posed by the institutionalization of initial teacher education and started paying more attention to the key / decisive agent in the quest for quality of education, the teacher. The first attempts to capture the specifics of foreign language teachers resulted in normative profiles, usually long lists of their desirable qualities and actions. Professional standards entered the educational scene much later and have become an important contribution and, indeed, a milestone in defining generic as well as domain-specific features of quality teaching. Ideally, standards build on the current state of art in the field of both theoretical and empirical research. In foreign language teaching research identified a number of domain-specific issues that make the professional endeavour of teachers special. Compared to other school subjects, the fact that foreign language communicative competence stands both as the aim and as the procedural means of education makes it unique, and puts specific demands on a teacher´s pedagogical content knowledge. Furthermore, interculturality and multilingualism together with other cultural and social aspects of foreign language teaching have to be taken into consideration as the core cognitive and conative specifics of foreign language teachers. |