Abstract
The article addresses theoretical and practical aspects of developing social-personal competencies and communicative abilities in prospective primary school teachers, with special emphasis on communication as a key component of professional activity. The study aimed to examine and establish the relationship between primary teachers’ pedagogical abilities, their system of knowledge, skills, and abilities, and social-personal competencies.Psychodiagnostic methods were applied, including V.F. Ryakhovsky’s questionnaire to assess sociability (general communicative competence) and M. Snyder’s test to diagnose the ability to manage self-presentation in communication. The sample comprised 48 first-year students of the “Pedagogy and Methods of Primary Education” program at Margulan Pavlodar Pedagogical University.Quantitative results revealed a weak, statistically insignificant positive correlation between communicative and expressive abilities (r = 0.0714). Statistical processing of Snyder’s test yielded a mean of M = 13.52 and a standard deviation of SD = 3.22. It was established that the level of social-personal competence depends not only on subject knowledge but also on the development of general pedagogical and communicative abilities.The study’s novelty lies in empirically confirming the relative independence of communicative and expressive abilities and in attempting to standardize Snyder’s test on this student sample; a structural model of interrelations among key components of teacher training was also proposed. Its practical significance is the development and substantiation of diagnostic and developmental measures to enhance social-personal competencies for integration into primary teacher education