Council of Europe

Guida per lo sviluppo e l’attuazione di curricoli per una educazione plurilingue e interculturale

The Languages in and for Education project has at its centre a commitment to an integrated approach to language teaching and learning. This means that in a school context all teachers, whether of the language of schooling taught as subject, second/foreign languages or other curriculum subjects, have a vested interest in and a responsibility for the pupils’ development of language competence. This paper discusses the aims of language as subject and foreign language teaching, and considers aims as they relate to the teaching in/of minority languages and language in other subjects, stressing the need to identify common goals.

A guide for the elaboration of curricula for plurilingual and intercultural education cannot do without an introduction on the notion of curriculum. The authors of this study are convinced that a curricular perspective has a lot to offer, both in a conceptual approach of educational problems as well as in how to address concrete development activities. Their aim here is to ‘re-invent’ a broad curriculum perspective, illustrating the broad curriculum perspectives with applications for language learning and for plurilingual and intercultural education.

Whatever the subject, all knowledge building in the school context involves working with language. The purpose of this text is to suggest a general approach enabling different levels of specification of these language dimensions to be classed in transversal descriptive categories. The aim is to describe the process leading from units for analysis of actual uses to the identification of linguistic forms and mechanisms appropriate to those uses. It is aimed not only at the authors of curricula and textbooks and the designers of tests, but also at teachers, and especially teachers of subjects sometimes quite wrongly described as “non-linguistic”, to draw their attention to the language components of work in their subject. It is also relevant to teacher trainers, particularly those responsible for the teaching of disciplines other than languages taught as a subject.

Lingua e discipline scolastiche – Dimensioni linguistiche nella costruzione delle conoscenze nei curricoli

The European Language Portfolio (ELP) was introduced as a concept in 1997 and formally launched in 2001. It has been taken up in almost thirty Council of Europe member states and 107 models had been accredited by the spring of 2010. The ELP is concerned with the learning and use of second and foreign languages (L2s), which is just one focus of the Languages in Education/Languages for Education (LE) project. But can the LE project benefit from the pedagogical experience that has accumulated over ten years of ELP implementation?

This satellite to the Guide for the Development and Implementation of Curricula for Plurilingual and Intercultural Education focuses on assessment aspects. First, a brief overview is given of the various aims of assessment in plurilingual and intercultural education. The authors' understanding of assessment is then briefly outlined. Finally, the assessment of selected competences having to do with core aspects of plurilingual and intercultural education is presented and discussed.

La valutazione delle competenze plurilingui e interculturali