Effects of opportunities to learn in teacher education on the development of teachers’ professional knowledge of French as a foreign language

An important goal of teacher education (TE) is to improve pre-service teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), pedagogical knowledge (PK) and content knowledge (CK). It is not always clear what kind of opportunities to learn (OTL) in TE contribute to pre-service teachers’ knowledge development. We compared different cohorts (N = 360) in TE, and studied the effects of OTL (PCK, PK, CK, and practical experiences) on pre-service teachers’ PCK, PK and CK (in the domain of French as a foreign language). Second and third year students outperformed first year students on PCK, PK and CK (measured through quantitative test instruments). Positive effects of PCK OTL on PCK and PK are found, as well as positive effects of CK OTL on CK.status: publishe