French and English as a foreign language in Flemish schools.

The aim of this project is to systematically compare the education of French-as-a-foreign language and English-as-a-foreign language in secundary schools in Flanders. The following aspects will be analyzed and compared: institutional requirements, curricula, (explicitly and implicitly) intended language skills, evaluation criteria, pedegogic methodologies and techniques, didactic materials, concrete outcomes. The starting point of the comparison is a decriptive-theoretical model which will be developed on the basis of an in-depth investigation of the available literature on language education, language proficiency, and language acquisition. This model will subsequently be tested against the reality of foreign-language teaching in Flanders. The aim of the propsed project is twofold: first, to develop a theoretically grounded descriptive instrument; second, a comparative analysis of English- and French-as-a-foreign language teaching in Flanders.