Curriculum Reform in Latvia: A Move from Multilingual to Plurilingual Education

This chapter addresses the issue of multilingualism and plurilingualism in language education. It uses language curriculum reform in Latvia as a research context, to find out if the new 2018 Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) descriptors can be used in introducing the plurilingualism approach to language education to improve student performance. The present results of school exit examinations in foreign languages in Latvia do not match the existing schools’ curriculum achievement target of level B2, as the majority of school graduates do not reach the target in the existing school system where each language is taught separately. Therefore, the state curriculum reform aims at a competence approach which envisages the integration of all subjects into domains, languages included. This plan for curriculum reform matches the approach promoted by the Council of Europe and its plurilingual repertoire level descriptors. This article examines the draft curriculum development process and its preliminary results in relation to CEFR. The findings suggest that the plurilingual aspects of education are easier integrated into the descriptors of the context of language use than the descriptors dedicated to the structural or lexical competence of language.