This doctoral thesis concerns the theoretical basis, development and validation of a multipart instrument to provide students of educational sciences with some feedback about their competence-development (instrument KIPBI) and report to their experiences in practical training (instrument EIPRA). It thus supports the reflection capability of the student teachers. Both instruments are part of an online self-assessment (Tour 3-RLP), which is similar to the Career-Counselling for Teachers (CCT, see cct-germany.de) but unlike this, does not focus on ability but on competence-development. The instruments serve to promote the professional development of student teachers. This is a goal of the reformed concept of teacher training in Rhineland-Palatinate, the so-called KMK-standards for teacher training and education, the Rhineland-Palatinate "Framework School Quality" as well as of handouts and manuals for the implementation of in-depth practical training in teacher education. The first part of this dissertation describes the theoretical framework for the development of instruments for the "CCT-Tour 3-RLP" starting with the issue of professionalization in teacher profession. Historical dimensions and their associated approaches to teacher education research are manifold. They range from the aspect of "teacher personality" to the implementation of teaching-standards and standards for teacher education and output orientation. While within the 60s and 70s the personality approach was pivotal in teacher education research, nowadays expertise-development and models of skills-development are discussed as central issues. Therefore, the theory section describes the influence of previous research-paradigms and their semantic content upon the current trend. As one part of the analysis the construct of "teacher self-efficacy" will be explained, along topological and typological models of competence-development.
Furthermore the practical elements of teacher education and their contribution to the professionalization of future teachers are presented. Professional reflection is assumed to be a basis for developing expertise. Therefore it is necessary to investigate how theoretical knowledge can be "transferred" to practical performance. A unifying theory connecting the integration hypothesis (assuming that knowledge is directly transferable into practice) with the differentiation hypothesis (teacher skills form their own knowledgebase independent from both theoretical and practical knowledge) is provided by cognitive psychology (particularly by research on expertise). Endpoint of the theoretical discourse is the evaluation of the referred theoretical positions and their meaning for the Rhineland-Palatinate reform of teacher education and teacher training and the role that the "Tour 3-RLP" is going to play in this context.In the empirical part the methodical and methodological steps for validation of the instruments are discussed. At first the Swiss standards for teacher profession (developed by the Pädagogische Hochschule Schwyz, Central Switzerland) are presented. They can serve as a model building a competency-oriented tool that refers to competency stages.
An analysis of various methods for the setting of cut-scores aiming to develop appropriate competency levels is also a fundament for the procedures developed in the context of the empirical investigations. The results of the pilot-study and a follow-up study conducted with both described instruments (KIPBI and EIPRA) show that the instruments for competence-measurement fulfil the requirements of psychometric criteria (like a scale-structure) and tend to support student teachers´ self-reflection. Core concern of both instruments is the promotion of students, realized by the online-self-assessment by the use of appropriate feedback structures and related recommendations for action.The final chapter of this thesis includes the discussion of the results of the validation and implementation study. This final view is devoted to the question whether or not competency-modeling or standard-based approaches to professionalization are the only possible accesses to map and explain skills development. The role of reflection seems to be important for both the integral and the differential approach and interconnects them.
Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has experienced growing importance in the last decades and an increasing number of schools have already implemented CLIL programmes or are planning to do so. Though the potentials of CLIL programmes are widely praised, first research results also raise doubts if CLIL students can live up to these high expectations. Both Fehling (2005) as well as Rumlich (2013; 2016), for example, found that CLIL programmes not inevitably show the expected results but that the CLIL students’ success might also be at least partially explained by other influences, such as the selection process of future CLIL students. Hence, CLIL students apparently fall short of the high expectations that are usually connected to the respective CLIL programmes and as this is mainly based on the unsatisfactory quality of these programmes, Rumlich concludes that “it is now high time to focus on the quality of CLIL provision” (Rumlich 2016: 452). He continues to explain that “the promises of CLIL do not materialise automatically owing to the fact that another language is used for learning in a non-language subject” (Rumlich 2016: 452). It must be assumed that the success of CLIL teaching also highly depends on the quality of the CLIL teachers.
In contrast to the continuously growing number of CLIL schools, however, the number of specifically trained CLIL teachers is comparably small. In Germany, CLIL teachers are not (yet) required to attend any special training in order to teach in a CLIL programme. Notwithstanding, is it sufficient for a CLIL teacher only to be trained in the content subject and the foreign language? Or does CLIL teaching require more than the sum of these two components? Do CLIL teachers need additional teaching competences to the ones of a content and a language teacher? In the light of the recent findings of CLIL programmes falling short of the high expectations, the answer to these questions must clearly be “Yes”. Hence, in order to appropriately train (future) CLIL teachers, special training programmes need to be developed which consider the teachers’ individual educational backgrounds, i.e. their qualifications as language and/or as content teachers and build up on these competences through adding the CLIL-specific teaching competences.
Therefore, this thesis aims at developing a German Framework for CLIL Teacher Education, which considers both the already published, theory-based standards of CLIL teacher education as well as the practical perspective of experienced CLIL teachers in Germany. This German Framework for CLIL Teacher Education classifies the different teaching competences, which are derived from integrating the theoretical and the practical perspective on CLIL teacher education, with regard to the three different competence areas, i.e. the general teaching competence, the language teaching competence and the subject teaching competence and is hence adaptable to different CLIL settings and educational backgrounds. In addition to developing this German Framework for CLIL Teacher Education, which provides the content of future CLIL teacher education programmes, this thesis discusses different forms of structurally implementing CLIL teacher education programmes in the existing structures of teacher education in Germany. This is achieved through analysing the current state of the art of CLIL teacher education at German universities and systematising the different forms of implementing these training programmes in the prevailing educational structures. Building on these first two steps, in the third and final step, this thesis develops a CLIL teacher education programme at a German university that is based on the results and elements of the German Framework for CLIL Teacher Education as well as the state of the art of CLIL teacher education in Germany. Thus, this thesis is allocated at the intersection between foreign language teaching as well as teacher education and is structured in eleven chapters.