Políticas lingüísticas europeas y españolas: el camino hacia el cambio en la educación terciaria

Abstract

The mission of universities is to equip students with skills for the labour market and provide training for our global world. Languages and cultures are key tools in our multilingual social reality where our potential as citizens of the world is developed. Thus, language policies safeguard and facilitate the equality of opportunities, and it is in this central role they become an object of study in educational contexts. The Council of Europe, the European Commission and the European Centre of Modern Languages (Graz) recommends multilingualism as a basic principle and a central objective of language policies, and advocates CLIL as the path to reach the goal. Spain embraced multilingual projects right from the start and has become a landmark in their implementation; however, in higher education, their development has been rather heterogeneous from the beginning. Multilingual language policies were first developed in primary and secondary education, paving the way for its further expansion to tertiary education and, therefore, closing the circle of multilingual provision. Recent measures issued by the Chancellors’ Conference and the Association of Higher Education Language Centres attempt to set the path for a common framework in the promotion of multilingualism in Spanish universities.