Diagnostic Tools for Assessing Intercultural Competence in the Professional Training of Intending Foreign Language Teachers

The present study is devoted to the problem of adapting existing diagnostic tools for assessing the development of intercultural competence among future foreign language teachers. The relevance of this problem is determined by the fact that most widespread methodologies were not originally designed for the specific context of pedagogical education in the field of foreign languages. The paper carries out an analysis of both well-known standardized question naires (BICCI, CQS, ICSI) and a number of author-developed diagnostic instruments. The aim of the present research is to evaluate the applicability of existing diagnostic tools for measuring the level of intercultural competence formation within the context of professional training of future foreign language teachers. The following steps served as research objectives: to conduct an analysis of contemporary methodologies for diagnosing personal intercultural competence; to identify the potential for implementing the reviewed methodologies to assess the dynamics of intercultural competence development among students in pedagogical training programs. The research methods employed include theoretical analysis of scholarly literature on the research problem, comparative analysis of existing diagnostic methodologies, abstraction, systematization, and the deductive method. As a result of critically examining the potential of each methodology from the perspective of its extrapolation onto a student pedagogical sample, four key conditions ensuring the validity of their application were formulated: comprehensive use of survey methods for mutual data verification, diversification of diagnostic methods, consideration of the professional-pedagogical specificity of future activity, and maintenance of balance between measuring general and culture-specific intercultural competence. The obtained conclusions form the theoretical and methodological foundation for the subsequent implementation of the diagnostic stage within the framework of a pedagogical experiment