THIRD TASK

Review of a conference:
"El repte del professorat en la escola multilingüe"

MP1020-4 - Didàctica de la Llengua Anglesa

Ana Ardila Velázquez

Magisterio. 3º B
 ANA ARDILA VELÁZQUEZ

This video is about the conference of Laura Portolés during the 2nd cycle
of conferences “towards a multilingual school”: The 4th edition of the first days
organized in the UJI. Her conference focuses on the learning of English and the
teachers as an important source of information.

In one hand, the following ideas are the most important about
multilingualism and some sociolinguistic aspects:

Firstly, Multilingualism is a current topic and an important phenomenon of

globalization since we live in a plural world with a large number of languages. So,
it is important to differentiate between two concepts:

- Multilingualism: coexistence of two languages in the same context. An

example is the schools of Valencian community
- Plurilingualism: the ability of a person to speak more than two
languages. The students of Valencian schools are plurilingual.

Also, there are two important phenomena as consequence of

multilingualism: the interrationalisation (expansion of English as lingua franca)
and regionalization (promotion of minority languages)

Secondly, the role of teachers and family is crucial for the students
because they’re their role model.

In the other hand, there are some ideas about how to acquire languages
and multilingual development that is important to know as the fact that plurilingual
students haven’t got difficulties to learning well a language: they have an
advantage in aspects such as metalinguistic competence, vocabulary...

Nowadays, we know that the languages are connected in our brain, they're
not isolated. That is, there are transfers from the first language learnt to the
second one. So, a plurilingual student has a different competence: the
multilingual competence which is formed by the sum of languages learned, the
interaction between them and the strategies.

Also, the students in PEP model get better marks in English than the
students in PIP model. Why? Because In PEP model (studying in Valencian) the
students get a balanced bilingualism because of the subject of Valencian while in
PIP model (studying in Spanish) students don’t get it. So, studying in Valencian
make them easier to learn a third language.

Next, the bilingual education is a challenge for the teachers: it's a difficult
task. There are 3 conditions to learn a language:
 ANA ARDILA VELÁZQUEZ

- Input: exposure to a language (oral and writing)

- Output: the language we produce
- Feedback: modifications, corrections ...

Finally, what can teachers do in classroom? It is important to promote

positive attitudes to the different languages, to convey motivation towards the
language, to invite the family to participate, to use the different languages, to read
books in different languages, to watch the original films, etc.

Related to MP1020 syllabus, this conference make me know more about

doing a lesson plan of English since I can understand the difficulties of
monolingual students. Also, I know more strategies to do in a classroom to
facilitate my students the learning of this language.

In conclusion, the classroom is not monolingual. The multilingualism is

complex however it is very beneficial. The teachers should be involved in
facilitating language learning.