Abstract Summary
The quality of a teacher influences the quality of learning and teaching. The question about how academic settings should be best structured to allow for the development of well-qualified teachers arises. An explorative and qualitative approach is chosen to provide insights into concepts for teacher education at university level.
Abstract :
The education of teachers can be regarded as a major contributing factor to the quality in teaching (Hattie 2012). In today’s multilingual and multicultural world the implementation of foreign languages in primary schools (European Commission / EACEA / Eurydice 2017) needs to be put into practice by well-qualified English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers. Given this information, it is surprising that several researchers have identified a research gap in general in foreign language teacher education (Legutke & Schart 2016) and very specifically in the area of early foreign language teacher education (Wilden & Porsch 2017). Although several countries have defined standards for teacher education (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages 2013; KMK 2014), these are not supported by comprehensive empirical evidence regarding their suitability and effectiveness in pre-service teacher education. Hence, the question about how academic settings should be best structured and organized to allow for the development of well-qualified primary EFL teachers arises. Since hardly any empirical educational research on the development, implementation and evaluation of profession- and research-led teaching concepts for the development of primary EFL teacher competence exists, an explorative and qualitative approach is chosen to provide insights. Following an action research approach (Burns 2010), the talk presents outcomes of a research project that uses problem-centred interviews, student research diaries and student products to gain insights into the education of primary teachers in the subject English in the German university context. Based on these insights implications for future EFL teacher education are discussed.
