Description
Oplæg ved 11th International Conference of the International Association of Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC), Durham University.The Framework of Reference for Pluralistic Approaches to Languages and Cultures – Descriptors and Teaching Materials.
The paper will present a set of tools that have been developed within the FREPA research project (acronym for Framework of Reference for Pluralistic Approaches to Languages and Cultures), supported since 2004 by the Council of Europe’s European Centre for Modern Languages. The FREPA tools seek to facilitate learners’ development and strengthening of plurilingual and intercultural competences. The tools consist of (a) a comprehensive list of descriptors operationalizing plurilingual and intercultural competences in terms of knowledge, attitudes and skills, (b) a database of teaching material for all levels of learning categorized by the descriptors and (c) a training kit for teachers, all available on the project website: http://carap.ecml.at/. The Framework of Reference for Pluralistic Approaches to Languages and Cultures represents a complement to current European language policy instruments and especially to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, specifying in detail and structuring its rationale on plurilingual and intercultural competences.
Based on psycholinguistic research work on language acquisition conducted curing the last decades (cf. Herdina & Jessner 2002), the FREPA project promotes pluralistic approaches as an essential method to develop plurilingual and intercultural competences. Today, there are at least four pluralistic approaches which are more or less established in the educational field: intercultural pedagogics (cf. Byram 2003), Awakening to languages (cf. Candelier 2007), intercomprehension of related languages (cf. Meißner et al. 2004) and the integrated didactic approach to different languages studied (cf. Hufeisen & Neuner 2004). In contrast to singular approaches, which take account of only one language or a particular culture, the concept of pluralistic approaches refers to didactic approaches which use learning/teaching activities involving several (i.e. more than one) varieties of language or cultures (Candelier et al. 2007: 7). Pluralistic approaches reject the ‘compartmentalised’ view of an individual’s linguistic and cultural competence, assuming that this competence is not a collection of separated individual competences but a plurilingual and pluricultural, dynamically evolving competence encompassing the full range of linguistic and cultural features available to the learner. Pluralistic approaches consequently take into account all the existing competences developed by the students’ within or outside the educational environment, i.e. the language(s) of schooling, regional, minority and migration languages, modern and classic foreign languages.
| Period | 30 Nov 2012 → 2 Dec 2012 |
|---|---|
| Held at | Unknown external organisation, Denmark |