Language Policies and Language Teaching

Approaches to the "Center for foreign languages" program

Abstract

The Uruguayan State has always considered the teaching of modern languages in secondary education beneficial. French, English and Italian were the languages that traditionally integrated the different cur-ricula. Portuguese, for political-linguistic reasons, was never included. In 1995, English was established as the only foreign language of compulsory education in public and private secondary education. In 1996, the Centre for Foreign Languages (CLE) Programme was set up to offer optional and extra-cur-ricular courses in French, Italian and Portuguese to students from the public education. Later, German, and Uruguayan Sign Language were added. The objective of the paper is to present an investigation carried out on the CLE Programmme. To begin, some of the measures taken by the State in relation to the teaching of foreign languages in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries are briefly de-veloped. Then, the basis of the creation of the Programme, its characteristics and its evolution in statis-tical terms are analyzed. The research shows that the total number of students in the Programme has never reached 10% of the public it is aimed at, and that, between 2002 and 2015, that number has steadily declined. It is also noticed that, although Portuguese is the language with the highest number of pupils, followed by Italian, French and German, the limited information available makes it necessary to relativ-ise the conclusions. Finally, the research raises new questions: on the one hand, regarding the coherence between the state discourse and the reality of the CLE Programme and, on the other, about the causes of the limited information available about it.