DEVELOPING PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE: A FIVE-COMPONENT DIAGNOSTIC FRAMEWORK AND A STRUCTURAL–FUNCTIONAL MODEL WITH PILOT EVIDENCE FROM UZBEKISTAN

Communicative competence is a system-forming component of teachers’ professional competence, yet in pedagogical higher education it tends to develop as a by-product of individual courses rather than as a purposefully designed and measurable outcome. This study aimed to substantiate the structure of pre-service teachers’ communicative competence, to develop a weighted diagnostic framework and a structural–functional model for its development, and to obtain initial evidence of the model’s effectiveness. A sequential mixed-methods design combined a comparative analysis of 11 structural models, an expert survey (n = 52), a baseline assessment of 386 pre-service teachers from three universities in Uzbekistan and a one-semester pilot quasi-experiment (experimental group n = 34; control group n = 32). A five-component structure (motivational–axiological, cognitive–linguistic, operational–technological, interactive–social and reflective–regulatory) was operationalised through 5 criteria, 15 indicators and an expert-weighted Integral Communicative Competence Index (ICCI). Expert agreement was high (Kendall’s W = 0.742), and the 95-item instrument showed strong reliability (Cronbach’s α = .91; CVI = 0.81). At baseline, 68.65% of students were at the low or medium level, and the reflective–regulatory (M = 2.47) and operational–technological (M = 2.64) components were the weakest.