Advantages and disadvantages of using ELP with my groups

Taking into account my personal teaching context, what would be the advantages and disadvantages of using the ELP with my groups?

 

The ELP is a formal and personal document that contributes to the assessment of language skills in different educational levels, from pre-school to university, thus fostering processes valuing language learning throughout life.

From my point of view, the ELP is very useful in vocational training and in university studies because we must prepare these students for the working world. In this case, the ELP shows more information about the student than a list of supporting documents. However, this document is not easy to develop, so it is important that students learn its development gradually throughout their learning process. And it is here where we can see the usefulness of students begining to develop their own ELP at early stages of education (nursery, primary and secondary school).

As a secondary school teacher, I strongly believe that teaching my students to develop this document has a lot of advantages. On the one hand, it can help them to get involved in the planning, reflection and evaluation of learning process, it can encourage them to register what they can do in each of the languages and include information on linguistic and cultural experiences obtained inside and outside the formal education context. This can also help them to understand the plurilingual European Context.

On the other hand, the preparation of this document requires considerable time and effort by the students and teachers who have to cover a very extensive curriculum. And furthermore, it is very important to train both teachers and students to work it properly.

To sum up, I find it very interesting to incorporate the development of the ELP in the teaching process in my groups, not only because it may be useful for them in the future, but also because we can work different attitudinal aspects of the curriculum. However, I think this process has to start from previous levels and continue at secondary school, so that when students reach levels of vocational training and / or university, we do not require much time to prepare the ELP properly because the curriculum at these levels is very extensive.