Learning how to teach languages
Avancem is an innovative pilot project involving the Catalan government and schools aiming to integrate language teaching and the coordination of language teachers with the aim of achieving true plurilingualism
Young people in Catalonia are expected to finish their compulsory schooling having mastered the two official languages (Catalan and Spanish), and with a working knowledge of a third language (usually English), and in some cases even another foreign language. This means children in Catalan schools are subjected to many hours of language classes, and yet the final results are not always what might be expected.
For some time, many teachers and educators have warned that how languages are taught in Catalan schools needs an overhaul. The most obvious case is English, which despite being well-established in schools for many years now, has still not produced the desired results, especially in comparison with other European countries.
It is a concern shared by Catalonia’s education department, which for the past three years has run an innovative pilot programme known as Avancem. “It’s about making progress in our strategy to achieve plurilingualism,” says the deputy director of the department’s Languages and Plurilingualism section, Mònica Pereña.
In practical terms, it means such things as ensuring that language teachers work in an integrated and coordinated manner, while avoiding all too common situations, such as duplicating explanations in Catalan and Spanish language classes. “It happens a lot more in secondary than in primary schools, because at the earlier stage the same teacher covers most areas and so is more aware of what they have taught in each subject,” Pereña points out.
Whatever the specific measures, what is required is “organisational changes in schools”, such as unifying the Catalan, Spanish and English language departments into a single language department, which can then design a common language learning strategy for the school. All the centres taking part in the Avancem programme [each at a different level of involvement] get orientation and teaching materials they can adapt to their particular situation,” says Pereña.
The project begins with a group of educators training to analyse the school’s language situation. A three-year plan is drawn up based on their findings, which is then ratified by an inspector. In the first year, there are 45 hours of training, 20 hours in the second year, while in the third year inspectors evaluate the educational project and its results.
Team work vital
“For the moment, we still lack data from inspectors’ evaluations, but participants’ evaluations from surveys are very positive,” says Pereña, who adds that a typical comment from participants is that it is high time that all the language teachers in the school sat down together to discuss their work.
One Badalona secondary school, which has a high level of cultural and linguistic diversity, is one of the centres most involved in the programme. The school signed up the last academic year after realising that it needed help implementing its existing project to promote plurilingualism. Last year, the education department gave them training on how to go about integrating the different languages. According to the head of the school’s language department, Cristina Fons, “participating in the Avancem programme has helped us systematise the processes we were carrying out.” Fons adds that in the second year the pilot plan will give some teachers the chance to do an exchange with colleagues in Sweden, which has a highly developed programme that includes professionals who speak the native languages of migrant newcomers to aid their assimilation into the host culture.
At the Badalona high school, teachers have broad experience in dealing with multilingual pupils, and the head of the language department is well aware of the usefulness of the students’ linguistic baggage for speeding up the learning of what is for them new languages, such as Catalan and Spanish.
Pereña concurs and stresses that often schools have little knowledge of the actual cultural and linguistic situations of their pupils. For example, they often do not know that many children who speak Arabic or Amazigh at home also know French, with the obvious advantages this has for learning another Romance language, such as Catalan or Spanish. Native teachers and pupils need to be aware of the cultural diversity around them. “Interculturality is understanding the cultures of others,” says Pereña. For her, it is very important that the pupils “see that their own language is recognised,” and many schools now include the foreign mother tongues of their pupils in some of their educational and recreational activities.
The Avancem programme, which has the support of different research groups at both the Pompeu Fabra University and the Fundació Blanquerna, received a warm welcome at a language learning congress held in Bologna last May, where the linguistic benefits of the project for a society like Catalonia, which has two official languages and a third foreign language that is widely included in study plans, was debated. To achieve a good level of learning in all three languages, says Pereña, a rethink of teaching methods is needed. “It’s not enough to learn vocabulary and just to know that ‘cèl·lula’ is ‘cell’ in English,” she says, in reference to the current trend in schools of teaching science subjects in English.
“The teaching of languages needs to be integrated,” she says, stressing that “language teachers need to coordinate.” What’s more, according to Pereña, “not mastering language is one of the main causes for school failure,” and she gives the example of a philosophy teacher who discovered that the real reason why his pupils were failing their exams was that they did not understand all the words he was using.
education
Catalan as a working language
Schooling in Catalan, which was only recently in the news after it was challenged by the Spanish government, aims for every child in Catalonia to finish their studies with a high level in both official languages: Catalan and Spanish. In some areas of the country this system of linguistic immersion in Catalan schools is particularly important, as otherwise students would have almost no contact with the Catalan language. The idea behind the policy is for Catalan to be a common language for all pupils, whatever their origin or home culture. In such a diverse society, opting for Catalan as a common working language is an element that aids social cohesion. The problem is that in some schools, Spanish is used more than Catalan, which is relegated to an academic subject, particularly in the secondary school system.