cohesion - European Centre for Modern Languages

The need for in-service training of teachers
Since 2004, all students whose native language is different from the language of
instruction have had the right to apply to study their native language in schools as part
of the national curriculum as an elective subject. By introducing this option, the state
undertook to support the training of national minority native language teachers.
Teachers, including teachers of elective subjects, must meet certain qualification
requirements. From the point of view of teacher training this was a new target group:
there had previously been no formal requirements for teachers for native language and
culture studies, which were simply provided by people who could speak the language
they were teaching to some extent and knew the culture.
The language spoken at home by a large proportion of the national minorities living in
Estonia was Russian, meaning that in fact it was only possible to learn and use the
language at national minority Sunday schools, and access to culture in the native
language was also limited. Therefore, in planning the training, several facts had to be
taken into account: that the students who had shown an interest in their native
languages could not speak them at all; that the groups were small and made up of
students of different ages; and that many of the people providing the native language
and culture studies lacked the training that would be required of them to teach in
general education schools.
During the planning period of the training, the primary objective was to prepare these
people to work in schools, which meant that the qualifications required of teachers had
to be taken into account. A teacher working in a basic school must complete
professional training in the subject or subjects that he or she teaches as well as teacher
training or higher education in the field and a 160-hour (four credit points) pedagogical
course. Such courses were available in Estonia's higher education institutions, but the
desire to enable people who were already teaching national minority native languages
and culture in cultural societies to do so in elementary and lower secondary schools led
to the need for a specialised additional training course.
Evaluation of the minority language teacher in-service training
A three-module, 10-credit-point pilot training course (Appendix 1 of this contribution)
has now been designed and carried out by the University of Tartu. In order to evaluate
the effectiveness of the content and organisation of the training, the author of this
article conducted a survey among national minority native language and culture
teachers who had completed the course.
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