Criteria for evaluation of intending primary school teachers’ foreign language communicative competence

Abstract

Modern views of scientists on the process and the result of evaluation of primary school teachers’ foreign language communicative competence are analysed in the article. The assessment process is a special (diagnostic) component of the control, and the evaluation is its result. Evaluation is a quantitative indicator of the learning outcomes quality, indirectly characterizes the development of future professionals, their ability, attitude to the profession, which can be expressed in the form of qualitative verbal characteristics.
The author examines the varieties of intending primary school teachers’ foreign language communicative competence evaluation; the effective means of assessing it are revealed. The educational values of the teacher and the purpose of learning the language certainly influence the assessment of student achievement. Scientists K. Kohli and J. McMillan distinguish the purposes of performance and the purposes of mastery. The teacher, whose main purpose is excellent task performing, first of all assesses individual abilities and rewards for their perfect performance. If the aim of the teacher is mastery, he focuses on assessing students’ development, mastering new skills, improving them.
Assessing, in the process of which information about students’ knowledge is collected in order to adapt studying to improve learning, is defined as formative. It is a process in which the teacher systematically monitors students’ progress in language learning, helps them to overcome difficulties and eliminate deficiencies that affect students’ motivation in learning. Formative assessment demonstrates to students their ability to master the language under certain conditions and active actions. Therefore, formative assessment is now recognized as an effective means to influence students’ motivation to learn a foreign language, and is therefore a promising area of research. In our research, we take it as a basis in the process of forming the intending primary school teachers’ foreign language communicative competence.
The study describes the criteria and indicators of the researched quality formation. The influence of the assessment of intending primary school teachers’ foreign language communicative competence on their motivation to learning a foreign language in higher education institutions of Ukraine is described in the article.