Background: To provide proper and quality teaching and training of would-be teachers is the mandate of teacher education institutions. Hence, they are expected to ensure that the would-be teachers that they are training are able to demonstrate the essential competencies required in various domains to become effective and competent teachers. If well-equipped, they can efficiently establish the meaning and purpose of education and promote the potentials of their future learners.
Purpose: Identify the competency levels of pre-service language teachers and develop a competency-based training program for their improvement.
Participants: The respondents of this research were 65 pre-service language teachers in five Philippine teacher education institutions, cooperating teachers in the laboratory schools, and supervising instructors during the second semester of academic year 2013–2014.
Research design: Mixed-method design (explanatory sequential design)
Data collection and analysis: A 100-item examination identified the competency levels of the pre-service teachers in the areas of language curriculum, foundations of language and literature, and teaching methodology. In the treatment of the qualitative data, significant statements of the respondents that helped clarify dubious results in the quantitative data were filtered. To identify the significant statements, frequent or common statements were considered. These statements were then used within the results and discussion section to clarify, substantiate, and confirm the outcome of the quantitative results.
Findings: The quantitative results of the study revealed that the language competency levels of the pre-service teachers in the areas of curriculum, theoretical foundations in language, theoretical foundations in literature, and methodology are at the beginning level. The qualitative results presented the suggestions given by the in-service teachers in improving the performance of the pre-service teachers, namely: intensified pre-service language teachers’ training, updated in-service language teachers’ training, inflamed love for reading, aligned language curriculum, defined admission policy, and mastered basic language skills for language teachers, thus the formulation of the Helm of Competency Improvement.
Recommendation: It is highly recommended that teacher education institutions strengthen their curricular alignments and trainings in their different course offerings using existing international standards for language education.