to preschool teachers’ contexts of work for them to be able to experience ‘that it works’. In other words, that it is clearly a benefit for the children, which was their principal concern in the survey. The relevance of practical experience can also be concluded from the data that addresses preschool teachers’ concern to give priority to learn German first: the data revealed that it would be a misconception to conclude that teacher opt to exclude foreign language learning (including English) in preschool. They simply believe that the children need to learn German first. If teachers would experience that incorporating English in the daily routine is manageable and that children’s language development, including German, would benefit from the additional language learning experience, their attitude might further be developed in support of foreign language education.
An obvious further conclusion for the set-up of the teacher education project that the macro level questionnaire survey demonstrated is that the factors affecting teachers’ attitudes are also clearly related to their competences in both their language skills and their English teaching skills. A viable strategy for the teacher education project therefore would need to provide ample initial support (both on the language and methodology levels) and it would then need to find ways to enable preschool teachers to take over and to continue offering English during the week for the by integrating it in their weekly timetables independently.
Approaches and models of professional teacher education that address these contextual demands will be elaborated in chapter 5 when research on professional teacher development is drawn on to develop a teacher education project, focusing on a support system which addresses the needs of this particular context.
For the meso level of the case study a preschool needed to be identified that would fulfil two criteria: it would need to qualify as representing the context of the multilingual inclusive state preschool both as regards the children who attend it and the team of teachers that educate the children. It would also need to identify a team of committed preschool staff that is generally in favour of ‘giving it a try’ as they see generally the potential of early English language education. This question of sampling is addressed in chapter 6.
After contextual affordances, constraints and preschool teachers’ attitudes and needs have been reviewed, the following chapter 4 will turn to research on professional language teacher education. It will both summarize what research has identified to be appropriate principles to set up language teacher education programmes both for language teachers in general (→ chapter 4.1) and early language teacher education in particular (→ chapter 4.2). This review will provide the basic principles for the set-up of the preschool teacher education project presented here. This will be followed by a survey on the competences early English language teachers need that research has identified. It will be divided in teachers’ communicative English language competence (→ chapter 4.3.1) and their pedagogical content knowledge (→ chapter 4.3.2).
As will be seen, there is an impressive overlap between the needs that preschool teachers addressed in the questionnaire survey and what teacher development studies have identified to be requirements for an appropriate set-up of teacher development projects that aspire to bring about change in the contexts of practice for which they have been designed.
4 Research on professional language teacher education and teacher competences
4.1 Research on language teacher education in general
Even though research on teacher education has gained importance in language teaching both nationally and internationally (Abendroth-Timmer, 2017, p. 196), research studies on the effects of educational programmes on teachers’ competence development are still underrepresented as Legutke and Schart (2016) conclude in their introduction to the current situation of foreign language teacher research:
Sucht man … nach Studien, die die Bildungsprozesse dieser komplexen Programme [they refer to university-based foreign language teacher education programmes in Germany] oder ihre Effekte für die Ausbildung der Kompetenzen der Lehrkräfte erforschen, wird man bis heute kaum fündig: Die fremdsprachendidaktische Forschung im deutschsprachigen Raum hat sich dieser Zusammenhänge erst in jüngster Zeit angenommen (Roters & Trautmann 2014 mit Überblick), … die fremdsprachendidaktische empirische Lehrerbildungsforschung [ist] im deutschsprachigen Raum kaum entwickelt. (pp. 10,11)
The few existing empirical studies are based on individual research often done in connection with qualifying for a PhD degree and are not studies that have resulted from collaborative research projects: they have focused on investigating teachers’ experiential knowledge and their subjective theories (Appel, 2000; Caspari, 2014), on teacher education projects that focus on participants’ needs (Schocker-v. Ditfurth, 1992) or on the role of integrating practice phases in teacher education programmes (Gabel, 1997; Schocker-v. Ditfurth, 2001; Elsner, 2010; Schädlich, 2015). More recently, studies in connection with researching the effects of a blended learning Master course for primary school teachers investigated its potential for cooperative learning (Zibelius, 2015) and action research (Benitt, 2015). The situation is quite different, however, if you review international research on foreign or second language teacher education (SLTE): this has developed to become an established field of empirically grounded research as a number of recently published state of the art review articles demonstrate (e.g., Wideen et al., 1998; Singh & Richards, 2006; Wright, 2010).
Reviewing the existing body of research on professional teacher education which has only recently been termed “an emerging new agenda” for second language teacher education by Wright (2010, p. 263), the following strands can be identified that are expected to contribute to language teachers’ development.
Teacher education programmes need:
to address the growing heterogeneity of learners both related to their cultural backgrounds and related to their home languages (Legutke & Schart, 2016, p. 9); to this day most existing studies are situated in more privileged learning contexts that do not represent the social reality of contexts of education today;
to focus on the teacher whose role is fundamental in creating supportive learning environments; teachers have only been a ‘factor’ that was considered in learning to teach studies since the 1990ies (Schart, 2014). It was only a decade ago when Samuda and Bygate (2018) concluded after having reviewed the state of task research in foreign language education that even though tasks in language classrooms “do not take place in a vacuum, nevertheless, until recently, much of the … literature has had a tendency to treat them as if they did. … The role of the teacher as a mediating factor … remains virtually unexamined” (p. 379). Meanwhile, the central role of the teacher in his / her contexts of work has become generally approved knowledge in general teacher education research (Hattie, 2008; 2011; Terhart, 2014; in Legutke & Schart. 2016, p 9);
to “build upon the beliefs of … teachers and feature systematic and consistent long-term support in a collaborative setting” (Wideen et al., 1998, p. 130). This was concluded after Wideen et al. had reviewed 93 empirical learning to teach studies. Wright (2010) demands that the “split of learning experience and location (or practice and theory)” needs to be overcome which consequently means that teacher education needs to be school-based and to support learning from experience (pp. 264, 265). This proposal has been first brought forward by Freeman and Johnson (1998) who argued that “learning to teach is a long-term, complex developmental process that operates through participation in the social practices and contexts associated with learning and teaching” (p. 402). In their seminal article they have “reconceptualised the knowledge base” of teachers and argued that in teacher education one would need to focus on the activity of teaching, the social contexts of teacher learning and the pedagogical process of teaching and learning;
to be concerned “with REFLECTIVE PRACTICE (after Schön 1983, 1987), brought initially to the wider SLTE community by Wallace (1991) … [which] signals a fairly radical departure in curriculum design and teacher education practice from the prescriptive to an emphasis on the student teacher’s development of autonomous judgement and practical theory” (Wright, 2010, p. 265; capital letters in original). This results in a focus on learning from experience. The departure from the transmission approach to