Nature of competence expectations achieved by pre-service teachers for EFL teaching at early ages

This article deals with the nature of the competence expectations achieved by future teachers of EFL at early ages, in accordance with the rationale of professionalism and career guidance. The awareness instrumented by the European Portfolio for Pre-primary Educators (Goullier et al., 2015; 2020) is elicited. The utterances given by a significant sample composed of future EFL teachers of four different years are analysed through thematic content analysis and through categorization by adopting a descriptive-interpretive approach. The results are interpreted according to the degree of importance attributed to the domains and fields of competences established at European level, taking into account the semantic characterization of the corpus of statements with regards to the professional skills. In so doing, the results anticipate the panorama of a professional profile with imbalances between the fields of competence. In this sense, critical key issues are found regarding the undeniable linguistic and cultural element in early EFL teaching. Furthermore, the results hint remediation lines, which may reduce uncertainties of university trainers to manage adapted training actions and optimise the professional development of EFL teachers.