Implementing Polylingual Space into the Process of Training Future Primary School Teachers

Abstract

The relevance of the problem under research is due to a new social order of the society, reflected in the Concept for the Development of Foreign Language Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan, where the formation of a polylingual personality is determined as the final qualitative result of studying a foreign language and culture. In these conditions, the problem of training the respective pedagogical staff primary school teachers, is being actualized for constructing a new type of education in a polylingual environment at the modern stage of the modernization of education, including the issues of developing its theoretical and technological support. Improving the quality of education, being a key problem of pedagogy, in the modern conditions of expanding the areas of international cooperation and the tendencies of forming a unified global community, comes into sharp focus. The aim of the article is to develop the content of an experimental curriculum on polylingual space and to test the formation of language competence of future primary school teachers in the process of higher education, as well as to study the specifics of their training for working with students in the multicultural educational space of modern Kazakhstan. The leading method of studying this problem is the analysis, which allows to identify the language needs of students. The study analyzed a series of surveys of 115 students and undergraduates, as well as university teachers of various disciplines. Moreover, implementing in the study such methods as analysis, synthesis, generalization, survey, diagnostics and carrying out various practical works, conditions to optimize the development of curricula and special courses and to remove obstacles in the implementation of trilingual education were determined. The analysis of works on improving the system of training primary school teachers in the conditions of polylingual space and the requirements for the personality of a teacher shows that the following areas of its implementation can be emphasized: the development of a teacher’s communicative abilities; the organization of experimental sites of different levels for teaching students in three languages; the development of integrative learning; the use of innovative learning technologies. As a result of the experimental work, the program of the discipline “Polylingual space: Theory and Practice” was developed in three languages for undergraduates of the specialty 6M010200 - Pedagogy and Methodology of Primary Education, a textbook with the same title and texts in three languages was published, tested, and implemented in the educational process. The materials of this article can be useful for primary school teachers, working in a polylingual environment, as well as for students, undergraduates and PhD students of the above-mentioned specialty.

Keywords

• polylingual space; training primary school teachers; trilingual education; intercultural communication; linguistic personality.