The formation of the foreign language teacher's general competence in the context of the Common European Framework

The development of the harmonious and competent personality is one of the most important tasks in the process of training future teachers.

This is the subject of many current researches, the analysis of which is represented in this article.

The goal of the given article is to explore the theoretical aspects of the formation of foreign language teacher's general competence in the context of the Common European Framework.

The Common European Framework provides a common basis of the elaboration of language syllabuses, curriculum guidelines, examinations, textbooks, ect. across Europe.

The taxonomic nature of the Framework inevitably means trying to handle the great complexity of human language by breaking language competence down into separate components. This confronts us with psychological and pedagogical problems of some depth. Communication calls upon the whole human being. The competences interact in complex ways in development of each unique human personality that leads to the formation of foreign language teacher's general competence. In our exploration we tried to take into consideration these theoretical aspects.

All human competences contribute in one way or another to the language user's ability to communicate and may be regarded as aspects of communicative competence. It may however be useful to distinguish those less closely related to language from linguistic competences more narrowly defined.

For the realization of communicative intensions, user's/learners bring to bear their general capacities as detailed above together with a more specifically language-related communicative competence. Communicative competence in this narrower sense has the following components: linguistic competences, sociolinguistic competences, pragmatic competences.

Linguistic competences is defined as knowledge of, and ability to use, the formal resources from which well-formed, meaningful messages may be assembled and formulated. Here we distinguish:

1. lexical competence;

2. grammatical competence;

3. semantic competence;

4. phonological competence;

5. orthographic competence;

6. orthoepic competence

Sociolinguistic competence is concerned with the knowledge and skills required to deal with the social dimension of language use. The matters treated here are those specifically relating to language use and not dealt with elsewhere: linguistic markers of social relations; politeness conventions; expressions of folk-wisdom; register differences and dialect and accent.

Pragmatic competences are concerned with the user/learner's knowledge of the principles according to which messages are:

1. organized, structured and arranged (“discourse competence”);

2. used to perform communicative functions (“functional competence”)

3. sequenced according to interactional and transactional schemata (“design competence”)

So, taken into consideration the results of our exploration we may conclude that the formation of foreign language teacher's general competence should be considered as a general criterion for their professional competence in the context of the Common European Framework.