The language club - teachers’ views on a project to raise linguistic diversity awareness in the 2nd cycle of primary education in Portugal

Abstract

This study aims at identifying the representations of teachers about the educational outcomes of a project to raise linguistic diversity awareness in the 2nd Cycle of Primary Education. The project, entitled “Language Club”, is aimed at the 2nd cycle of primary school students, and was implemented during the academic years 2018/19 and 2019/20, in a school in the district of Aveiro, Portugal. The project allows students to contact French, German and Mandarin, as extracurricular activities, in modules of 4 weeks per language, alternately. The data was collected at the end of the second year of implementation of the project and consists of interviews with the three language teachers involved in this project.
The results obtained show that despite recognizing the importance of the approach to raise linguistic diversity awareness, teachers choose to teach languages ​​individually, not conserving a plural view of languages. Even so, they believe that it is an innovative project, due to the offer of different foreign languages ​​in this educational context, which led to the increasing motivation of students to learn foreign languages ​​and that it will have a positive impact on their future choices.