Multilingualism in European Language Education. Edited by: Cecilio Lapresta-Rey, Ángel Huguet

Summary

This book explores how different European education systems manage multilingualism. Each chapter focuses on one of ten diverse settings (Andorra, Asturias, the Basque Country, Catalonia, England, Finland, France, Latvia, the Netherlands and Romania) and considers how its education system is influenced by historical, sociolinguistic and legislative and political processes and how languages are handled within the system, stressing the challenges and opportunities in each area of study. The chapters provide the reader with insights around three key aspects: the management of the guarantee of the rights of regional language minorities; the incorporation of the language background inherited by immigrants living in Europe (whether they are European citizens or not) and the need to promote the learning of international languages. Individually, the chapters offer deep insights into a specific education system and, together, the studies allow for a comparison and holistic understanding of multilingualism in European education.

Author Biography:

Cecilio Lapresta-Rey is Lecturer in the Department of Geography and Sociology at the University of Lleida, Catalonia, Spain. His areas of research are the construction of identity in multicultural and multilingual contexts and the linguistic attitudes of schoolchildren, especially the descendants of migrants, and their sociolinguistic and socioeducational integration.

Ángel Huguet is Professor in the Department of Pedagogy and Psychology at the University of Lleida, Catalonia, Spain. His research interests include bilingual and multilingual education, second language acquisition, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics.

Més informació: CUSC-UB Publicat el llibre «Multilingualism in European Language Education» |

Ja s’ha publicat el llibre Multilingualism in European Language Education (Multilingual Matters),coordinat per Cecilio Lapresta-Rey i Ángel Huguet. Montserrat Sendra i F. Xavier Vila, del CUSC, hi han publicat un capítol dedicat a Catalunya titulat Catalonia. A continuació, us en deixem un resum del text original:

Catalonia is a case in point in the field of language-in-education policy due to a number of reasons. First, Catalan, which is the largest minoritized language in Europe, has benefitted from remarkable efforts aiming at reversing language shift in the last decades, many of them focusing precisely on schools. Interestingly, these efforts have combined top-down and bottom-up initiatives. Second, contrary to what happens with most minoritized languages, the declared goals of language-in-education policies in Catalonia have been providing bilingualism and biliteracy not only for minority speakers, but rather for all students. This goal has been recently enlarged to include proficiency in a third language for all. And third, all of these goals are especially relevant taking into account that Catalonia’s society has changed dramatically since the beginning of the 20^th century, when it was a homogeneous Catalan-speaking society, to the current cosmopolitan and ethnolinguistically mixed society where 35% of the population is born elsewhere and most of the locals have at least some immigrant parents or grandparents. So, in many respects, lessons from Catalonia are valuable not only for minoritized languages, but also for linguistically heterogeneous societies in general.

The paper starts with a brief account of the historical evolution of the languages spoken in Catalonia until the 1970s, when the foundations of the current education system were established. It then describes the evolution of the language policies introduced over the last three decades, including the legal and political framework concerning languages at school. It discusses the design of Catalonia’s school linguistic model and its linguistic results, both in the official languages (Catalan, Castilian and Aranese Occitan) and in foreign languages (English, French, German or Italian). The last section focuses on language policies aimed at migrant children: it outlines the reception policies implemented over the last few years, and assesses the current treatment of their heritage languages. Finally, the controversy surrounding the Catalan conjunction model is discussed.