Comhaontú Chruinniú Mullaigh Barcelona

Barcelona Summit Agreement

On 15 and 16 March 2002, European leaders met in Barcelona to attend a European Council summit. What was to be agreed at this meeting set in motion the foundations of an ambitious plurilingual vision in which all Europeans would be able to speak two languages in addition to their mother tongue. This initiative became known as “mother tongue plus two” (MT+2).

The Barcelona Summit Agreement was a watershed moment in plurilingual terms for the European Union. It was short on the specifics of what linguistic standards its citizens should have in their additional languages and was also vague on how the ‘mother tongue plus two’ goal could be attained through the education system; it simply called for further action to “improve the mastery of basic skills, in particular by teaching at least two foreign languages from a very early age” (European Council, 2002: 19). The MT+2 aspiration has been re-affirmed and fine-tuned to an extent over the last two decades, but by and large, the desired standards for learners to possess in their two additional languages (not necessarily ‘foreign’ languages) and how this can be achieved through the education system remain unclear.

Proposed strategies

Edward P. Flynn proposes three strategies that the Irish education system could implement in order to make the plurilingual vision of the Barcelona Summit Agreement (2002) a reality. These strategies are:

1. Harmonising post-primary MFL classes in line with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) through cross-age teaching.
   In this strategy, students would no longer be divided by their school year and Ordinary and Higher levels, but rather would be divided by their language level (as defined by the CEFR) across year groups. In such a scenario, provided they would have the same CEFR level, a 12-year-old could be in the same MFL class as a 14-year-old, a 16-year-old, and so on. To read more about strategy 1, please check here.
2. Replacing the current state MFL examinations (Junior Cycle and Leaving Certificate) with CEFR international examinations.
   Instead of students doing state examinations in their MFL, they would do international CEFR exams. If successfully passed, students would be awarded an international CEFR certificate certifying their MFL level and it would be valid for life. To read more about strategy 2, please check here.
3. Implementing Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL).
   Students would receive greater exposure to their MFL through the implementation of a partial CLIL programme. In this proposal, certain content subjects (i.e., non-language subjects, e.g., maths) would be taught in part through the students’ MFL. To read more about strategy 3, please check here.

_{This is a preprint of the following work: Edward P. Flynn, Cross-age Teaching and Plurilingualism: Realising the Barcelona Summit Agreement, 2026, Palgrave Macmillan, reproduced with permission of Springer Nature. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-96656-9.}