Meeting to analyse a global plan for language teaching

06/05/2009

The research group GREAL (Grup de Recerca sobre l'Ensenyament i l'Aprenentatge de Llengües) has organised this conference, which forms part of the activities programmes by the Research-Stimulating Network LLERA (Llengua i Literatura, Ensenyament, Recerca i Aprenentatge). This Network, which includes nineteen research groups from seven different Catalan universities, is the only of its type in Catalonia to focus on the area of the teaching and learning of language and literature. Participating at the conference will be members of the research groups pertaining to the network such as PLURAL, GRAL, GRERLI (UB), GR@EL, ALLENCAM (UPF) and GREIP (UAB).

The phenomena of globalisation in the fields of economics or communication media, the consolidation of the European Union, the large amount of people from around the world who migration to Europe, and - in the case of Spain - the coexistence of two official languages in some areas have brought about deep changes in what society demands of educational centres in terms of language learning. Schools will need to teach more languages and incorporate the new uses deriving from information and communication technologies. Furthermore, this will need to be done in a classroom filled with children who speak many different languages at home.

Upon verifying through experience the difficulty in an efficient management of this new reality, teaching staffs have been especially interested in a coordinated planning of language teaching, based on the belief that there is a need centres to carry out coordinated actions within a global planning framework of language teaching in schools.

The initiatives in this direction however have had little effect so far in both Spanish and European education systems. The definitive step towards this reality proposed in publications and documents has rarely been put into practice. The differences in methodological traditions in first and foreign language teaching have tended to conceal a point in common: the object in study is very similar, the objective of the study is identical and the agents of the learning process are the students themselves. These conferences will serve to make advances in the line of a global language training programme.

They will focus on an integral teaching in the area of languages and aim to be an area of reflection and exchanges for early childhood, primary and secondary school teachers, for teachers in training and administrators and managers in education, as well as researchers in language teaching and learning.

More about the GREAL Group

GREAL has been in existence for over ten years. Its members include research and teaching staff, grant holders and doctoral students of Language Teaching at the UAB, the University of the Basque Country, the University of Valencia, and primary and secondary school teachers.

The group's research lines, which are developed under the financing of different projects, are:
a) the teaching and learning of written composition and in particular the metalinguistic activity within the written composition process with special attention to plurilingual situations;
b) the training evaluation in the area of language;
c) the teaching and learning of grammar, with a special focus on the contrast between languages.

More about the Llera Network

The Llera Network was founded during the 2006/07 academic year and was first directed by Dr Anna Camps, professor in Teaching Language and Literature at UAB. The Network currently is directed by Dr Oriol Guasch from the Department of Teaching Language and Literature and member of the GREAL group.

It was created by an initiative of the Department of Universities and Education of the Catalan Government as a first step in the coordination of research in the teaching and learning of languages and literatures in situations where many languages coexist such as those which can be found at Catalan universities. The objective of the Llera Network, in addition to the interrelation of perspectives in this interdisciplinary field, is to promote research and disseminate its results and at the same time offer an innovation in the area of teaching.

The Network also aims to represent a first step in the challenge of establishing an institutional organisation of the research carried out in language and literature education in Catalonia.

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