Teacher education curriculum for teaching immigrant students in Portuguese schools

Abstract

Educational systems of most European countries seem to be unable to respond adequately to the growing migration-induced multilingualism. None of the European member states has developed an integrated approach to address linguistic diversity in teacher education programmes that will respond to the demands of inclusion, equity, and social justice for all learners. This paper presents a European proposal for a second language teacher education curriculum and the process of its adaptation for the Portuguese context. This curriculum intends to prepare content teachers to work with immigrant pupils in mainstream classrooms with a focus on academic language. After the contextualization of the issue of social and linguistic needs of these immigrant students, the authors present a brief overview of the European project curriculum for Inclusive Academic Language Teaching, followed by a discussion of the Portuguese proposal and its implementation caveats. The authors propose a module on Portuguese as a Non-Native Language (PNN L), which covers the issues of second language acquisition in the schooling project, didactical issues of teaching and learning (inclusive) academic language, inclusive academic language and school organization issues. A national proposal for Portugal also embraces the concept of the teacher as a critical reflective practitioner and of school as a learning community. The authors conclude that this European proposal responds to pressing necessities in Portugal for the education of these students and constitutes a viable response to their language needs, in spite of the many constraints in its application.