>>Well, first and foremost, I think, in once the notion even
of becoming a language teacher comes to the fore,
the first thing I look at is
so do you have the language competence.
Because I find one of the problems that arises
in our profession is the immediate lack
of professional ability
within the language itself before we even get to the notion
of are you professionalized as an instructor, a teacher,
a teacher of teachers, a trainer of other teachers.
So, linguistic competence, first and foremost,
I think if really, really important.
The second thing I talk to them about is good grounding
in general linguistics whether they have it already
or whether this is something they want to develop.
It's just simply a notion of how languages are put together.
Most of them find this really helpful, by the way.
I've mentioned this only because students often see it
as ancillary to knowledge and teaching
about Spanish or Russian or French.
But once they actually take the course work,
they actually now find that they know
and understand a great deal more about what they simply intuited
over the years of their study of the language.
So, I think linguistic knowledge is a good one.
And then finally, probably, most important from the perspective
of preparing teachers now is work in pedagogy and to me
that falls into two categories: one, pedagogy general
about what teaching is about, what the difference
between teaching and learning are all about,
different methodologies and methods that have come to us
over the years of how languages might be presented to students,
differences in the types of learners that we're going
to get; public school age children
versus university students and so forth, adult learners.
All of that, the kind of background that one needs
in a sense of general pedagogy, before getting then
to the specific pedagogy of each individual language.
And that, I think, is important from the perspective
of as a university teacher a more or less,
homogeneous classroom of English as a native language speakers,
learning X language, what are the particular problems
that group will probably face.
That will be as they say "likely problems" or "likely obstacles"
or "likely issues" as they begin the study
of the target language whether it's Russian
or Arabic or French or Persian.
That to me - thats the kind of tripartite I that I look at so knowledge
of the language, knowledge of general linguistics
and then the applied portion both general to any pedagogy
and specific to the language.