Diagnostic competencies of prospective teachers of French as a foreign language: judgement of oral language samples

The diagnostic competence of foreign language teachers includes the ability to judge oral language productions. However, these are difficult to judge because of their complexity. Video-based data can be used to explore the diagnostic processes when judging oral productions. In the present study, prospective teachers evaluate nine video samples twice – directly after first viewing the video and after using a rating scale regarding the linguistic features. This study examines the extent to which prospective primary and secondary level teachers use different information to make a judgement compared with experts. The results show that linguistic features are incorporated to varying degrees into the formation of judgements and vary according to pre-service teacher training. Besides the focus on linguistic features, a high proportion of unexplained variance remains in the judgements of the prospective teachers.