Early foreign language teaching in Slovenia is currently receiving a lot of attention, mostly because English is now an elective subject in the first grade and compulsory from the second grade of primary school onwards. Only teachers that finished master's teacher training program for specializing in teaching English to young learners can teach English in the first triad of primary school, or specialist teachers in English language teaching and primary education teachers with an additional in-service teacher training for early English language teaching. After finishing their studies, teachers find themselves in a classroom, where they are expected to have their general and subject-specific competences for early English language teaching well developed. In our master's dissertation we are focusing on subject-specific competences that teachers need to develop if they want to be »good« English language teachers. Certainly, teachers can strengthen those competences during their profession and this way, they become more personally and professionally developed.
The results of the quantitative research, which was attended by 100 teachers that teach English as a foreign language in the first triad of primary school showed that in general, teachers think they have their subject-specific competences well developed and feel sufficiently competent to teach English to young learners. Based on our data, we can find some differences between specialist teachers and primary education teachers in the fact, that primary education teachers assess the importance and development of their special-didactics competence better than specialist teachers, while those give greater emphasis on language competence that is in their opinion developed with fewer deficiencies than all the other ones. Also, we can see that all teachers have their intercultural competence developed with more deficiencies, since they occasionally encounter certain limitations and problems, while integrating cultural content in the classroom. Moreover, comparing to other subject-specific competences, they don't see integration of cultural content that important in early English classroom. The research also demonstrated a weak connection between previous education of teachers and development of their subject-specific competences. At the end of our research, we came to a conclusion that teachers compensate their deficiencies in the field of subject-specific competences with strengthening competences in various ways, especially as regards their language competence.
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