THE PROFESSIONAL PROFILE OF LANGUAGE TEACHER IN EDUCATION AND TRAINING COURSES. A CASE STUDY IN PORTUGAL

Abstract

This study aims to analyse how language teachers of Education and Training Courses (ETC) define their professional profile. To achieve these goal, the study focused on a group of ETC language teachers in the Center for Education and Development called Pina Manique in Lisbon, Portugal, institution dedicated to the vocational education, that is characterized by possessing a multicultural population, with socio-economic problems and in the risk of social exclusion. Placing us in a frame of a constructivist paradigm, we resorted to a qualitative oriented approach stressing on revaluation of the "person" as a subject of knowledge able to reflect, to rationalize, to communicate and to interact. For this purpose, we held semi-structured interviews to all ETC language teachers of the institution and subsequently proceeded to their content analysis. From data analysis and interpretation we concluded that, in fact, there is a need for these teachers to have a differentiated profile, consisting of a pedagogical component befitting this particular context, combined with a series of personal characteristics such as flexibility, tolerance and communication skills. The data also reveal that there is a need to adapt pedagogical-didactical practices to this type of particular contexts, especially in foreign languages, taking in account both the characteristics of the learners and the specificities of the languages.