Issues in Promoting Multilingualism. Teaching – Learning – Assessment

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Hanna Komorowska

discussion, games, debates, pair work, group work or project work. Nativespeaker competence was no longer sufficient nor could any single set of materials precisely target an idiosyncratic combination of factors in a given group of learners. For the first time in the history of language teaching true professionalism was needed on the part of the classroom teacher.

2. The structure of language teacher education Interest in teacher education started with the debates at national and international levels on processes and procedures leading to a formal teaching qualification. Attention was given to the length of the teacher training course, the status of the training institution and the role of the socalled induction phase in schools – issues presented in detail in Eurydice publications from 2002 and 2008. The length of the preparation for the teaching profession was in many countries considered insufficient and was extended as early as the 1970s e.g. in Germany, Iceland and Malta. In the following decade similar decisions were taken in Belgium, Sweden and Slovenia, while in the 1990s the length of study was extended in France, Norway and Latvia. Many countries in which future teachers were trained at non-university teacher training institutions decided to start training teachers at universities. Together with academic education, prospective teachers were now offered more contact hours within the professional component of their study. This process was started relatively early, i.e. in the 1970s, in Denmark and Malta. In later years it also reached Sweden, France and the Netherlands as well as countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Eurydice 2002: 8–21). Countries where the pedagogical component was not part of the academic curriculum or which offered amounts of contact hours considered insufficient for professional education opted for a final on-the-job qualifying phase of study. Such a phase was usually school-based and functioned as induction into the teaching profession. This kind of solution has, for instance, been adopted in England, Cyprus, France, Holland, Germany, Portugal, Slovenia and Luxembourg. Some countries, like Poland, introduced a system of promoting qualified teachers in which the first stage was at the same time the induction stage. In some countries, e.g. Germany, Slovenia, Luxembourg or Cyprus, the final on-the-job qualifying phase in schools is treated as part of university education, therefore students have to pass


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