Study of multilingual competence in education

Director: Jasone Cenoz

The aim of this line is to evaluate multilingual competences from a holistic perspective taking into account the relationship between the languages within the students’ repertoire and of the school’s curriculum. The specific aims include the analysis of the linguistic repertoire and the communicative competences of the multilingual students as well as the distribution of the language use within formal and informal settings. It is also its aim to propose innovative instruments to evaluate linguistic competences within the educational context.

Within the last years the concept of multicompetence among multilingual speakers has had an important theoretical development. However, the multilingual competences and the use of several languages within the educational context have not been sufficiently analyzed. In this line of research we adopt a holistic perspective when taking into account all languages that form the students’ repertoire. The analyzed languages can be part of the school’s curriculum as language of instruction or as subject and in some cases the languages used at home are not part of the curriculum. In that context, an alternative form of evaluating the languages at school is aimed to be developed, based on the linguistic competences of the real life and on the use of the languages.