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Project

Adding Plurilingual Approaches to language Teacher Competences in Higher Education (APATCHE)

The aim of the APATCHE project is expressed by its acronym and title. It is to "Add Plurilingual Approaches to language Teacher Competences in Higher Education", by raising awareness through various publications, dissemination events, a methodology for curriculum development and an online training course. Plurilingual approaches to language learning and teaching are approaches that value all languages present in the increasingly multilingual international classroom in higher education (HE) as a single, comprehensive set of competences. The APATCHE project wishes to raise awareness of the importance of such a plurilingual approach and to provide the necessary means of introducing them in HE all over Europe. To that end, we shall try to answer three questions, namely What is it?; Why is it needed?; and How can we implement it? (1) With respect to the 'What?' question, our objective is to raise awareness of, and to collect, provide and disseminate knowledge on the importance of plurilingual approaches in HE (and knowledge construction in general), embracing national languages as well as English as the predominant lingua academica and allowing for learners to develop language skills more effectively, while increasing autonomy and motivation, and fostering positive intercultural attitudes; the advantages of plurilingual learning as compared to monolingual approaches; the importance, for reasons of dissemination and societal impact, of scientific knowledge development in local and national languages as well as in English; necessary skills and attitudes to be developed and fostered; ways to develop these. (2) With respect to the "Why?" question, our objective is to raise awareness of the need for, and usefulness of plurilingual approaches in HE, both in (foreign) language classrooms and in multilingual classrooms in which languages are not in themselves the object of instruction, but a means of deepening conceptual knowledge, of enhancing student motivation and learning effectivity, and of increasing the ability for future graduates to communicate scientific knowledge to citizens and create future impact in European societies. (3) Related to the "How?" question, our third objective is to create ways of allowing HE teachers to familiarize themselves with possible methods and scenarios to bring plurilingual approaches into the HE classroom and to acquire the necessary competences to do so.
Date:1 Jan 2022 →  31 Dec 2023
Keywords:HIGHER EDUCATION STUDENT CENTERED LEARNING, MULTILINGUALISM, LINGUISTIC TRAINING, MULTILINGUAL EDUCATION
Disciplines:Language curriculum and pedagogics, Second language learning, Teacher education and professional development of educators