Community Languages in Europe: Challenges and Opportunities

This paper reviews issues affecting school students’ learning of community languages across Europe, with the aim of identifying both challenges and opportunities inherent in the current context. Language education pol icy has become more inclusive of late, addressing the full range of languages rather than ‘foreign’ language s alone, and offering opportunities for the mainstreaming of community language provision. However, most provision currently reflects earlier policies which tended to marginalise community languages, and it is likely that much work needs to be done to overcome some of the barriers to effective provision which these earlier policies created. The paper reflects early thinking about these issues from the VALEUR project team, funded by the European Centre for Modern Languages to map current provision and investigate outcomes