Awareness of Plurilingual Competence in Teacher Education

Abstract

This chapter reports a longitudinal study that sought to examine how two courses on language teaching methodology affected the awareness of and beliefs about plurilingual competence held by a group of student teachers (N = 50) at the University of Barcelona. The courses were given in the first and second years of their studies, and data was collected at the beginning of the courses. The students were asked to produce two visual narratives in response to the same prompt ‘Me and my languages’, each time complemented with verbal (written) comments. The findings suggest that a change in the type of visual narrative from one phase of data collection to another may be an indication of the development of plurilingual awareness. In addition, a shift towards a more complex vision of plurilingual competence was identified after the first course.