ABSTRACT
Traditionally it has been understood that, in order to become and remain an effective FL teacher, you need to possess at least a good level of subject knowledge. What has been less clear, however, is what other types of knowledge in addition to linguistic proficiency you require. In fact, until not too long ago it was possible to enter the teaching profession without a bespoke teaching qualification. Although up until the early 1970s subject knowledge was considered to be a sufficient prerequisite to enter the teaching profession – graduates could traditionally become teachers without any pedagogical and methodological training – teaching as a profession of certificated members has evolved in England and Wales since 1973, when it became a requirement that all those wishing to teach in maintained schools should complete an identified course of teacher education before they could obtain a teaching post. At the time of writing this is still not a requirement in the independent sector. In the postcompulsory sector, changes towards professionalisation are being introduced, and a teaching qualification is becoming a requirement. Arguably, certification of the teaching profession has a causal link to the introduction of comprehensive schools from the mid 1960s and the resultant diversification in pupil population, which seemingly rendered a mere grounding in subject knowledge through academic study in itself an inadequate prerequisite for subject teaching. In this chapter, we argue that, in view of the increasing diversification of the pupil population, particularly in
required to make FLs learnable; this we call pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) here.
