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United Kingdom
- University of North London
School
of Education
The UK team:
| Suzanne Burley |
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| Cathy Pomphrey |
|
coordinator |
The aim of the UK project is to investigate new approaches
to language teacher education (particularly Initial Teacher
Training) which emphasize and make use of linguistic and cultural
diversity as a basis for understanding the teaching and learning
of language.
Our interest as the UK partners in this project is to achieve
some of the goals of Intercomprehension by training Modern
Languages and English ITT students to collaborate with each
other in discussing issues related to language or language
learning and teaching. There have been many previous calls
in this country to provide a more integrated, multicultural
and cross-curricular approach to planning language education
(for example Hawkins (1984)¹, Brumfitt
(1988)², Stubbs (1991)³.
We now have a number of national policy initiatives which
provide a basis for integration such as the NLS, the NC 2000
and the recent Language and Literacy across the curriculum
documentation (2001). Our project aims to act on these intentions
by promoting a dialogue and a more holistic approach to language
teaching in two key curriculum areas, English and Modern Languages.
However at present the national documentation provides little
specific acknowledgment of the links to be made between the
two curriculum areas or indeed between different languages
and language varieties. The National Curriculum for MFL is
still focused on the learning of a single foreign language
and the English curriculum does not exploit the potential
for use of language diversity in looking at language. To address
this, our project uses the principles of intercomprehension.
These principles are outlined in the following definition:
Intercomprehension informs an approach to training future
language teachers. It focuses on their coming to know and
understand how language works, through an examination of individual
knowledge and understanding of languages and language varieties,
the texts of both written and spoken forms.
¹ Hawkins, E. (1984),
Awareness of Language. An introduction Cambridge Cambridge
University Press
² Brumfitt, C.J. (1988)
(ed) Language in Teacher Education. Brighton National
Congress on Languages in Education
³ Stubbs, M. (1991)
Educational Language Planning in England and Wales: Multicultural
Rhetoric and Assimilationist Assumptionsin Garcia, O.
and Baker.C. (eds) 1995 Policy and Practice in Bilingual
Education: A reader Extending the Foundations Cleveland
Multilingual Matters
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