DEVELOPING PEDAGOGICAL COMPETENCE IN PROSPECTIVE TEACHERS OF CLASSICAL LANGUAGES THROUGH PROJECT METHODOLOGY

Background. The professional activity of a teacher requires a wide range of skills and personal qualities including flexibility, creativity, getting adjusted to learning conditions, the ability to select an appropriate teaching methodology and assessment technique as well as compile syllabuses, educational materials, textbooks, etc. All these skills and qualities are components of pedagogical competence which is the key to professional training of prospective teachers of classical languages. Developing the above-mentioned competence requires specific training so that it fully reflects real conditions of teaching activity. Therefore, to develop pedagogical competence, the author suggests making use of project methodology with the focus on simulating real professional activities of a teacher.Purpose. The article aims at defining the concept of pedagogical competence of a classical languages teacher. It describes the competence structure, considers the project methodology in terms of its implementation in teacher training as well as develops criteria to assess the acquisition level of the competence under discussion.Results. Based on the analysis of a number of researches, pedagogical competence of a classical languages teacher is defined as a system of knowledge and skills, abilities and readiness of a prospective teacher to design and organize the process of teaching classical languages. Additionally, the competence involves assessment skills, the ability to design educational materials and motivate students to learn classical languages, be flexible and creative while addressing a variety of standard and non-standard situations in the classroom. With these concepts in mind, the author insists on project methodology underlying the process of building pedagogical competence. In particular, 7 short-term creative projects were developed to be carried out in pairs or groups. They include: Designing a syllabus (competence-based approach); Building lexical competence in classical languages; Developing grammatical competence in classical languages; Shaping linguistic and sociocultural competence in classical languages; Building competence in reading; Designing a final test; Planning a class in classical languages. The level of competence acquisition is assessed relying on the following criteria: the quality of the selected teaching materials, compliance of the materials with the curriculum requirements, arrangement of exercises and tasks, the quality of exercises, and the correlation of the language material with professional needs of the students.Discussion. In further research, we think it necessary to experimentally verify the effectiveness of the de­veloped projects for building pedagogical competence of prospective teachers as well as to model the teaching process based on experimental data.