Abstrakt
In the last four decades, there has been a dynamic development in research on professional expertise, focusing primarily on explaining the preconditions of expert performance in a certain domain of human activity (Ericsson et al., 2006, Friege, 2001). Gradually, this focus has also been established in the area of education, both on general level and in individual subcultures within the teaching profession (e.g. foreign language teachers).
In teaching, more attention has recently been paid to processes of developing and maintaining expertise. This attention has also resulted in Czech research on pedagogy and it has been covered by the research project Expert Teacher: the nature of expertise and determinants of professional development (in FLT perspective) which was performed in 2011- 2013 at the Faculty of Education of the Masaryk University, Brno (CZ).
In addition to examining the nature of expertise - meaning the highest quality of professional performance of foreign language teachers as a phenomenon set in a specific time and context - we focused on investigating both the subjective and the objective determiners of developing and maintaining teacher expertise, being the phenomena that affect these processes. The paper opens with the anchoring of expertise within the area of pedeutological research.
Thereafter, results of one of the partial studies are presented which was performed to identify the above-mentioned determinants in the Czech cultural context.