What is it about?
The article describes the framework of reference for intercomprehension competences that was developed within the EVAL-IC (Evaluation des compétences en intercompréhension) project. Intercomprehension is a form of multilingual communication within a language group (for example, within the Romance language group). The interlocutors use one or more language(s) of the language group in which they have sufficient productive and/or receptive competences to make themselves understood and to understand others. Communication is mainly based on the proximity of the languages used, but also to a large extent on other, non-linguistic, and higher-level competences.
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Why is it important?
What makes this approach innovative is its focus on describing and, above all, assessing competences in several languages at the same time as part of a whole and not in an isolated way. The assessment involves several tasks that are arranged around a central theme. Learners can prove their intercomprehension competences by understanding, analyzing and comparing written and oral texts in several languages of the language group, producing texts based on this information and then presenting and discussing them with a multilingual jury. The developed models and the evaluation protocol are available on the project homepage.
Perspectives
The developed model provides valuable impulses for fostering multilingual learning and teaching. It takes into account the entire (linguistic and non-linguistic) repertoire of language users and does not focus on individual languages, unlike traditional approaches that are still prevalent.
Margareta Strasser
Universitat Salzburg
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Plurilingual and pluricultural competence, AILA Review, September 2022, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/aila.22008.str.
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