Preliminary adaptation and evaluation of the “Teacher's speech culture” course for pre-service Kazakh language teachers

Professional speech culture is an essential component of teacher preparation, yet university courses in this area often emphasize normative linguistic knowledge without sufficiently integrating its application to authentic pedagogical communication. This study aimed to preliminarily adapt and evaluate the Teacher's Speech Culture course for pre-service Kazakh language teachers by strengthening the integration of normative-linguistic, communicative-pragmatic, discursive, and interactive components of professional speech competence. A single-group pre-test–post-test design was used. Initially, 180 students were recruited from two higher education institutions in southern Kazakhstan; 156 completed all stages and were included in the final analysis. The adapted course combined theoretical instruction with professionally oriented communicative situations, independent construction of professional utterances, interactive tasks, and reflective analysis of speech behaviour. Professional speech competence was assessed before and after the course using diagnostic and performance-based measures. The assessment demonstrated satisfactory internal consistency (Cronbach's α = 0.86). Data were examined using pre-test -post-test comparisons and path analysis. Overall professional speech competence increased from M = 7.84 (SD = 1.62) to M = 9.72 (SD = 1.48), t (155) = 11.46, p < 0.001, Cohen's d = 0.92. Significant improvements were also observed across the normative-linguistic, communicative-pragmatic, discursive, and interactive components. Path analysis indicated that the ability to analyse professional communicative situations had the strongest direct association with professional speech competence. Professional speech competence was also positively associated with speech self-control and flexibility of professional speech behaviour. The findings provide preliminary empirical support for a practice-oriented adaptation of the Teacher's Speech Culture course that connects knowledge of language norms with contextual analysis, independent speech production, and regulation of professional communication. Given the absence of a separate control group, the observed changes should be interpreted as pre-test–post-test differences associated with course participation rather than evidence of a causal intervention effect. Further controlled studies involving broader samples are required to evaluate the effectiveness and generalizability of the adapted course.