What is the project about?
The project will focus on teacher education for the language of schooling
(e.g. French in France, Polish in Poland). It aims to provide access to
plurilingual approaches so that teachers can address and build on linguistic
and cultural diversity in classrooms. The project will also promote
collaboration between teachers of all languages.
Abstract
In multilingual schools the range of learners’ first languages is wide.
This means that the language taught in the language of schooling ("mother
tongue") classroom is L1 or mother tongue for only a few learners and,
therefore, even the language of schooling is being studied within a
plurilingual environment. Indeed, all the learners in the classroom are
plurilingual, as they learn many foreign languages in school and master
different varieties of their first language (e.g. dialects, hobby-related
registers and language-use typical to certain communities they belong to).
These languages and varieties do not exist separately in people’s
cognition but they are all part of the same linguistic repertoire. We should
not, therefore, ignore learners’ proficiency in various languages in the
classroom of language of schooling. Languages need to be seen as situated
resources that learners draw on when using a language for a particular
purpose. All language teaching should enhance learners’ individual and
multilayered language repertoires and support the development of a holistic
linguistic identity.
The primary aims of teaching language of schooling is to equip learners to
cope with the cognitive and academic demands of the school and future life in
the majority language, and to give access and knowledge about its literary and
cultural heritage. However, the point of plurilingual education in the
language of schooling classroom is that it (a) enriches this experience with
other heritages and traditions,and (b) that it is the way in which allophone
learners are going to relate their own experience and therefore identify with
the language of the school as a subject, so that all the learners'
experience of it becomes fuller, and (c) that this will make learning more
effective in reaching its primary aims.
When developing the teaching of language of schooling towards a more
pluralistic approach, the key issues are:
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How to develop learners’ plurilingual repertoire and intercultural
competences?
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How to embed a plurilingual approach in the language of schooling curriculum
and integrate it with other learning contents?
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How to enhance productive cooperation and shared vision between teachers of
different types of languages (majority language, foreign languages, second
languages, first languages)?
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What kinds of approaches can be used for developing learners’ language
repertoire in the language of schooling classroom?
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How does teacher education need to be developed in order to prepare teachers
to practise more inclusive, plurilingual approaches?
This project aims to move away from prevailing monolingual approaches to
language of schooling teaching and teacher education, instead promoting an
enriched view of educational possibility. The pedagogical view of the project
perceives diversity as potentiality, rather than deficiency. The project
builds on the work done in the
Marille and
Carap projects which
focused on the knowledge, skills and competences needed to be developed in
promoting plurilingualism in multilingual settings.
The project focuses on the teacher education of language of
schooling and aims to provide concrete tools and study modules based on
plurilingual approaches and building collaboration between language teachers
and language subjects. It is a special challenge for the project to convince
also teachers with doubting attitude or no prior experience of the benefits of
plurilingualism in the classroom of language of schooling.