REPORT
XI Congreso Internacional de la SEDLL / XI International Conference of SEDLL (Spanish Society for Language and Literature Didactics)
Conference theme: “Competency-based foreign language teaching and learning”
Conference rationale: It is an uncontested fact that we are currently living a time of great change in language education worldwide. Both in Europe and in the U.S., language teaching is undergoing a process of reinvigoration and renewal which places the onus on the development of competencies. Objectives are now formulated in terms of competencies and learning outcomes, which involve not only contents or cognitive knowledge, but also skills, values, and attitudes. Competencies represent an initial attempt to overcome the traditional European university model based on transmission of knowledge through ex cathedra lecturing in favor of a student-centered, meaning-based one where critical thinking skills are promoted. They also strive to bring classroom learning closer to the problems and situations of real-world contexts and to ensure that students can adapt the “skills learned in one situation to problems encountered in another: in a classroom, the workplace, their communities, or their personal lives” (AACU report, 2002: 21). The ultimate aim is to form flexible and adaptable professionals who can apply competencies to the varied, unforeseeable, and complex situations they will encounter throughout their personal, social, and professional lives and who can thus become active and useful citizens in our democratic society.
We are precisely at that crucial moment in Europe of moving from theorizing to practice, of actively incorporating competencies into the curriculum and the new Bologna-adapted plans of study. It appears we have reached the maximum level of theoretical saturation in this area and practical specifications are needed to guide teachers in their professional activity. The move needs to be made from the theoretical formulation of competencies to their concretion in the educational curriculum. This is precisely the aim of the present conference, with its focus on “Competency-based foreign language teaching and learning”. It seeks to promote debate and share experiences on the incorporation, implementation, and evaluation of competencies in the foreign language curriculum at all educational levels.
Laia Viladot, Maria del Mar Suárez and Albert Casals, as a leaders of EMP Spanish partner, presented a paper called Música y aprendizaje de lenguas en el marco competencial (Music & Language Learning in competency-based frame). It presented the framework and aims of EMP (Music, Foreign Language and Education) and the process and progress of this project in Spain. After the conference, the paper was submitted for a conference monographic in a Spanish journal.
Abstract
Interdisciplinarity is essential in the competence framework of the present educative context. In it, both music and language are learning and knowledge building and communication tools, as well as tools of artistic creation and of orientation of one’s own actions in different contexts. Consequently, associating them can help to develop the communicative competences (both language and artistic-cultural).
In this article the connections between music and language – especially in education – are reviewed and the European Music Portfolio: A creative way into languages is presented. In this European project – based on the existing research and experiences – music is considered a privileged instrument to learn languages and a transfer of the typical ways to work with music is proposed in order to learn foreign languages in Primary Education.
Research has confirmed the many parallelisms between music and language, both theoretical and applied. In education, it is a fact that whereas many references are made regarding this interrelation between both, this interrelation has hardly been applied to the educative context. Given this situation, this project sets out to propose a specific teacher training programme and a series of materials for both teachers and students that allow broadening the musical resources used in the foreign language classroom nowadays. This poses some challenges, especially in teacher training, without which a holistic education of communicative competences is difficult to fulfil.
Keywords: communicative competences, foreign language learning, musical resources, European portfolio, teacher training.