Abstract:

One of the aims of the European strategy for smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth for higher education is to step up the modernization agenda of higher education (curricula, governance, and financing), including by benchmarking university performance and educational outcomes in a global context. Currently, there are 24 official languages in UE, and there are also several indigenous regional and minority languages (such as Catalan, Galician and Basque in Spain, or Welsh and Scottish Gaelic in the United Kingdom) and many other languages that have been brought into the EU by migrant populations, such as Arabic, Turkish, Urdu, Hindi and Chinese.

However, a recent study from the European Commission has shown that the teaching staff in European schools lacks experience with teaching in multilingual classes where there are immigrant students. This scenario poses inevitable challenges both for Native Language Teachers (NLT) who have to cope with levels of language that do not meet their full educational potential and for immigrant students learning the native language, who are always behind making as their school experience is more difficult and less rewarding overall.

Because of these challenges in teaching efficiency, the initial and continuous training of Native Language Teachers (NLT) arises as vital ways to prepare and upskill them for teaching in multilingual settings, for imparting efficient methodological competencies, pedagogical content knowledge and experience.
For these reasons, we believe that initial and continuing teacher training can ensure that teaching staff have the skills to teach children who don’t speak the language of schooling and may be multilingual. This is the base concept and motivation for the MATE Project – Mapping Teacher Education in Europe.

In this poster, we present the project’s four-stage implementation methodology that follows an onward and upward process, aimed at mapping the qualifications, teaching practice, pedagogical innovations and trends in NLT training and teaching in 20 European countries (stages 1 and 2); and creating instruments to upskill NLTs and keep them up to date, recommend the best training model for NLTs (stages 3 and 4), ultimately promoting excellence in NLT training. The results obtained in the first stage, gathered through desk research and interviews, are also presented. These consist of the mapping of NTL education and validation across Europe, showcasing the identified similarities and discrepancies.

Keywords:

International project, Education, Teachers, Native Language.