The Catalan education ministry has this Tuesday presented its revised Linguistic model for the education system of Catalonia. One of the most notable changes to the current system will be the addition of Arabic and Chinese as optional subjects in secondary schools.
Ministry officials have opted for a model in which individual schools, looking beyond percentages and curriculum requirements, should put together a linguistic model based on the needs of each student.
El conseller @JosepBargallo recorda que aquest document recull els documents del consell d’Europa sobre el plurilingüisme i la voluntat d’enfortir la cohesió social amb coneixement d’altres llengües: anglès, francès, alemany, però també àrab i xinès. pic.twitter.com/mIqYrVGUer
— Ensenyament (@ensenyamentcat) 23 d’octubre de 2018
Catalan remains the vehicular language of education. The department aims for all students, by the time they have finished ESO (Obligatory Secondary Education, up to age 16) to have competence in at least Catalan, Spanish and one foreign language (at B1 level on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages), as well as knowledge of a second (A2).
The department's plans go further still, looking to incorporate some of these foreign languages, namely the most-studied languages of English, French and German, into other subjects depending on possibilities. That could mean, for example, reading articles in English for biology class.