Competences and Foreign Language Teacher Education in Spain

Abstract

Over the last 5 years, important developments have taken place throughout compulsory and post-secondary education in Spain in terms of the treatment and assessment of competences. For those responsible for the training of new language teachers in this country, two competence-related challenges must be managed. Firstly, recently designed undergraduate (for primary teachers) and postgraduate (for secondary teachers) programmes have incorporated general and subject-specific competences which trainee teachers are expected to develop. At the same time, future language teachers must be prepared to collaboratively assess their own students’ general competences in conjunction with their colleagues in schools, in addition to their specific responsibility of developing communicative competence in the foreign language. The inclusion of competences in the school curriculum and in HEIs in the specific context of Spain is intended to fundamentally change the way in which teachers and teacher trainers train and conduct assessment of their students. This chapter examines these changes and points to the need to find a balance between the development of general competences in education and specific language education competences.