ICTs as a tool to support plurilingual competence in the EFL classroom in secondary education: analysis of a Template project-based task

Abstract

Over the last decades, the world has been constantly immersed in a dramatic digital and global transformation. This has led to new needs to be met by the field of education, especially language education, as citizens are interconnected sharing thoughts and ideas in different languages all over the world. This has supposed an increase in motivation for learning foreign languages. Due to this situation, it is necessary to teach young students the importance of using technology properly as well as the numerous benefits it provides. Accordingly, the Council of Europe developed several aims and objectives to train its citizens for a successful life work. Several projects have been elaborated during the last years in different levels of education to foster the importance of being plurilingual and digital competent. Different methodologies and approaches as Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) have been spread all over the world to accomplish the Council of Europe goals. The present study is carried out in a Spanish secondary education school, placed in Castellon, where 29 students of 4th of ESO from IES Penyagolosa, have been the participants of this study. The aim of this master dissertation is to implement, design, and discuss a task proposal taken from the European K2+ TEMPLATE Project1 which includes the use of technology to promote plurilingualism in the EFL secondary classroom. Therefore, it is considered to be an educational improvement modality which consists of the implementation of a task to improve the use of technology in an EFL classroom as well as to advance plurilingual competence by developing structural transferences between languages. This Master Thesis has three objectives: 1) to test to what extent the task is effective in terms of promoting students’ plurilingual competence, 2) to prove to what extent the task is effective in terms of promoting students’ digital competence and, 3) to test task effectiveness in terms of language learning (i.e., linguistic contents from the curriculum included in the proposed activities) and genreawareness (i.e., the structure of biography). The results of the implementation is further discussed in section 4.