‘Exploring ways to test mediation and pluricultural/plurilingual skills in the classroom’
LATE is proud to have participated in the organisation of a workshop for foreign language teachers in cooperation with the European Centre for Modern Languages (Graz, Austria) on the 19-21st February at the University of Latvia Library (Kalpaka bulvāris 4, Riga, Latvia).
The workshop was entitled ‘Exploring ways to test mediation and pluricultural/plurilingual skills in the classroom’ and was conducted by two ECML experts – José Noijons (the Netherlands) and Gábor Szábo (University of Pécs, Hungary).
The workshop was based on a training module within the RELANG initiative (Relating language curricula, tests and examinations to the Common European Framework of Reference).
In the three-day workshop curriculum developers, teacher trainers, policy makers and teachers of English, Russian as a foreign language, and French, were introduced to the new mediation and pluricultural/plurilingual scales in the recently published Companion Volume to the CEFR. The participants checked to what extent the new foreign language curriculum makes mention of these skill and explored possibilities to develop classroom-based tests that would link up with the mediation descriptor scales.
The RELANG initiative offers training to stakeholders in the Member States of the European Union and is carried out within the framework of a cooperation agreement between the European Centre for Modern Languages and the European Commission, entitled Innovative Methodologies and Assessment in language learning.
More information about the initiative can be found here.