COMMUNICATION COMPETENCE OF FUTURE TEACHERS AS A PREREQUISITE FOR THEIR PROFESSIONALISM

Abstract

The paper discloses the psychological aspects of improving pedagogical skills, which have always attracted and attract a lot of attention of teachers and researchers. It justifies the psychological aspects of future teachers’ communicative competence, which plays an important role in the structure of professional (pedagogical) competence. It shows that communicative competence is based on the teacher’s ability to organize professional interaction, which is mainly the ability to communicate effectively within the framework of professional activities. Also, the paper highlights the emotional (empathy) and verbal components in the development of communicative competence. Psychological aspects of verbal means of information transmission in communicative interaction are revealed through the categories of meta-language and implied sense. These categories reveal the hidden (often from the communicator) meaning of his or her words, which is directly related to the subject’s attitude to himself or herself, to the addressee and the interaction situation in general. Besides, the paper substantiates the need for a holistic approach to the study of the psyche in the process of developing communicative competence in future teachers in higher education. It involves taking into account both the conscious and the unconscious (latent) components of the subject’s psyche, which influence the situation of professional interaction. The paper employs methods of analysis of word semantics and psychoanalysis of thematic drawings. The presented methodologies objectify the symbolic expression of the deep-psychological (unconscious) tendencies in communicative activities of future teachers. The paper specifies the influence of traumatic childhood experience related to the feeling of inferiority (weakness) and the protective mechanism of identification on the process of developing communicative competence in future teachers. Psycho-correction practice proves that only psycho-correction can help the subject to realize the destructive influence of his or her personal problem on the interaction situation since it expands his or her reflection of the deep psychological motivation behind his or her actions. Teaching professionalism, in particular his or her communicative competence, depends on the level of personal correctness. The latter is directly related to eliminating the psyche destruction originated in childhood. The empirical material presented in the paper proves that any behavioural activity, including in professional situations, can express manifestations of the destructive tendencies of the psyche underlying the subject’s personal problem.