Plurilingual lessons

The materials on this website have been developed for use at Austrian Colleges for Higher Vocational Education (Upper Secondary Level).

There are various types of colleges. In many of them, learners have three lessons of English (L2) and three lessons of another language (L3) a week in their final year. In some types of colleges, the new curriculum requires that two of these six lessons have to be team-taught by the two language teachers for L2 and L3, thereby fostering plurilingual and pluricultural competences. L3 is usually French, Italian or Spanish, more rarely Russian. The level to be reached in English is B2, for L3 it is B1.

The main goals of the plurilingual lessons in the final year of these colleges are as follows:

• Learners should be able to integrate and to draw on all the language competences they have acquired.
• Learners should improve as mediators.
• Learners should become more flexible when switching languages.
• Learners should develop strategies for plurilingual communication.
• Learners should develop language awareness, i.e. when it comes to understanding and making use of similarities between languages.
• Learners should acquire additional content, grammar and vocabulary.

In order to support teachers and to provide some ideas, a variety of materials have been designed for final year classes. Additionally, as plurilingual activities should be integrated into teaching from the first year, there are also materials that can be used at lower levels.

The video was recorded in an Austrian school where the students have English and French lessons

Teaching Materials

L3 =  the language students learn after their L2: English

Please click on the picture to download the pdf.