Assessing Student Teachers Strategic Competence in Speaking English during Teaching Practice

Abstract

Students’ strategic competence in speaking can be interpreted as their ability to maximize the effective usage of all available language means to realize one’s personal aim and the overall purpose of communication process. Teaching is all about communication - listening, speaking, reading, presenting and writing. Teachers who hone their communication skills can effectively instruct, advice and mentor students entrusted in their care. The researcher being a teacher educator wanted to assess strategic competence of the student teachers who belong to the B.Sc. B.Ed integrated programme. To assess Student teachers distinctive peculiarities of strategic competence, the specificity of speaking as a skill  to teach and as an activity conducted this research using the modern tendencies in evaluation processes following the criterias- cognitive, communicative, goal-seeking, educational-compensatory with the corresponding indicators for evaluation which was established by Ternopil V. Hnatiuks. This paper aims to assess the strategical competency possessed by student teachers. The researcher being a teacher educator handling communication skills and pedagogy of English to the teacher trainees devoted much of her classes to strategy training to develop language learning. At the end of the fourth year the researcher prepared a tool and administered among the student teachers to assess student teachers strategic competency. It has been found that among nine student teachers five student teachers have excellent ability and three student teachers have  sufficient ability and one student  teacher have low ability and it is due to low content knowledge, communicative,  goal seeking and educational compensatory.