Project Result 2 - The APATCHE Descriptive Scale of Plurilingual Competence for Higher Education (knowledge, attitudes, and values, skills) aims to provide a general methodological framework usable for plurilingual course design and learning activities specifically in HE, on which plurilingual approaches can be built on by our target group of HE teachers. The descriptors also serve as expected learning outcomes of the open online course modules developed in the project.
The descriptive scale consists of a set of General descriptors at the meta-level, in three categories which combine the three APATCHE online course modules with the classical components of linguistic proficiency:
'What is plurilingual competence?' - pertaining to knowledge;
'Why is it important in HE?' - pertaining to values and attitudes;
'How can it be implemented?' - pertaining to skills.
The Scale fills in an important knowledge and skills-related gap concerning plurilingual education in HE. It addresses the primary target group, language teachers in higher education, whose plurilingual competence needs to be developed, in order to prepare universities in Europe for the challenges of increasingly international student audiences, EU’s multilingual diversity and inclusion policies.
The Scale is aligned with the European Commission’s commitment to the promotion of languages, linguistic and cultural diversity, and inclusion, specifically to the Council Recommendations of 22 May 2019 on a comprehensive approach to the teaching and learning of languages. It will thus contribute to bringing about the paradigm shift advocated by the 2001 and 2020 CEFR, specifically in HE, by tackling the issue of still predominantly monolingual approaches in language teaching and will allow to include all teachers and students’ plurilingual competences and build the learning of a new language on them.
