Measuring and assessing profession-related oral language competences of pre-service foreign language teachers

Profession-related language competences are recognised as a central component to ensure effective, successful and high-quality foreign language teaching practice. The high expectations and requirements placed on foreign language teachers in the specific linguistic landscape and educational context of Switzerland prove to be challenging to foreign language teaching education and pre-service and in-service teachers, and have been researched in particular by a team of Swiss researchers in FL methodology and plurilingual approaches over the course of the past ten years. A core piece of their work includes, based on an extensive needs analysis conducted within their project, a set of tools, guidelines and language profiles with distinct descriptors that have been developed to outline in detail the specific profession-related language skills foreign language teachers need to acquire. With the endorsement of swissuniversities and the recommendations of the Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers (EDK), language teachers, curricula developers, and other stakeholders at Swiss Universities of Teacher Education are now encouraged to build upon the developed language profiles and use them as a frame of reference in both curriculum design and language development, as well as potentially for language assessment in the future. On the basis of this groundwork, this paper reports on a study which seeks to address the relevance of empirically underpinning the language descriptors outlined in the profiles through exploring their potential use in practice. Specifically, it lays its focus purposefully on researching possible competence developments of oral profession-related language competences of pre-service secondary school language teachers in Switzerland, using the language profiles as a reference tool. This paper attempts to discuss options of how, based on a range of selected oral language skills specific to teaching practice extracted from the profiles, oral language proficiency could be fostered and how a potential change in competence could be recorded, monitored, measured and assessed. The language profiles are intended to be used as a framework of reference for diagnosis and evaluation in this particular empirical research study.