TAKING INTO ACCOUNT MY PERSONAL TEACHING CONTEXT, WHAT WOULD BE THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF USING THE ELP WITH MY GROUPS

First of all I want to introduce what is the ELP. The European Language Portfolio is a personal document of a learner. In this document learners from all ages can record their language learning and cultural experiences at school or outside school.

I work as a psychologist in a High School. Taking into account my personal teaching context, I would like to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of using the ELP within my groups.

On the one hand, the advantages to use ELP in classroom is that learners take over ownership of their learning process. It promotes a wide range of competences such as:

- Competence in linguistic communication because of ELP shows the level of language.

- Digital competence because of my students are over 14 years old and they can create their digital portfolio. It allows different access to different artifacts. They can modify the contents of the digital portfolio to meet specific goals.

- Learning to learn competence, the dialog and the abstract thinking. When they design a ELP they are aware of their learning processes and needs. They identify available opportunities and develop the ability to over come obstacles in order to learn succesfully.

It has an influence on student motivation in classroom learning activities.

ELP also develop social skills and citizenship competence because it helps to develop intercultural skills and facilitates mobility.

On the other hand, the disadvantages to use ELP is that teachers don't know it. Besides teachers think that they don't have enough time to work  within ELP in the classroom. It's very hard. Children with special needs such as children with attention deficit will have difficulties doing ELP because only have writing information, no visual information.

Another drawback to use a e-ELP is that is not accessible to everyone because no everyone has an e-mail account.

Taking everything into account, spend time learning to create a ELP has more advantages than disadvantages. The ELP facilitates education and vocational mobility and encourages lifelong learning of languages. It contributes to the promotion of democratic citizenship in Europe.