Professional pedagogical listening competence as an indispensable component of foreign language teacher's professional training

The article is devoted to the exploration of the characteristics of pedagogical listening being an essential part of the foreign language teacher’s communication activity and requiring special concern within the system of future professionals training. The study aims to make a case for the need for the pedagogical listening competence to be subjected to focused development during the foreign language teacher’s professional training. The first part of the article provides the definition of professional pedagogical listening and an analysis of the functions and peculiarities of teacher’s listening covered in the Russian and foreign scientific literature. The assumption is made that pedagogical listening has its own specifics based on the teacher’s subject area. The second part of the paper describes the function and peculiarities characteristic of the foreign language teacher’s listening. As a result, a number of features inherent to the foreign language teacher’s listening were highlighted. The analysis revealed that those features bring about some difficulties associated with the pedagogical listening implemented by a foreign language teacher, which requires the teacher to have special skills. The results suggest that the pedagogical listening competence requires focused development during the foreign language teacher’s professional training. The training process containing the components aimed at the development of that competence will provide higher quality training of future professionals and increase graduates’ capacity to perform their professional activities. The implementation of the task apparently calls for the development of proper scientific and methodological support, which should be considered as one of the promising lines of research on this field.