The professional skills of future language teachers: the case of Slovenian students

Abstract

Since the introduction of the Bologna process in higher education, future Slovenian teachers of French as a foreign language have been trained at the master's level after completing language, literature, and civilization courses at the bachelor's level. The pedagogical program consists mainly of psychological and pedagogical subjects, and there is little room for language classes. The situation is apparently similar in other countries, for example, in Romania: "As the study program is too full, there is little room left to our students for individual research, for reflection on grammar problems" (Manolache, 2013: 58). The French language will, however, constitute the discipline of the future teachers that we train and "mastering the discipline and having a good general culture" (Rey, 2012: 86) is one of the professional skills cited in the official programs. Every language teacher should first be a good philologist. We wonder if, for future teachers, three years of BA studies are enough to learn the language to be able to transmit it afterward to their future learners. The students - future teachers - find themselves in a transitional stage between learners and teachers. They are looking for professional autonomy, which is difficult, especially if they have doubts about their language proficiency. In this article, we propose to present the training of French as a foreign language in Slovenia and to expose points that seem problematic, among others, the language skills of future teachers. After analyzing the students' lesson planning prepared for the final course in high school, which also serves as an exam, we find that, even though these documents are written in schematic form, they are not without errors, sometimes quite basic. One of the solutions would be to introduce more language courses at the bachelor's level and especially at the master's level. This is also what the students propose in their evaluations.