The skills are identified by the OECD (2013, 2018a) as indispensable elements for the promotion of social inclusion, the generation of prosperity, and the transformation of lives. Without the right skills, young people are at risk of being left out of society, and countries cannot compete on equal terms in a globalized and increasingly complex world. The challenge for countries is to indicate the knowledge, skills, abilities, attitudes, and values needed by young people in 2030 and to define how education systems will develop them. This challenge implies the curricular restructuring of education systems, as recommended in the DigCompOrg (Kampylis, Punie & Devine, 2015) and DigCompEdu (Redecker, 2018) reports. In fact, the curriculum is a social construction (Goodson, 1997), an instrument of power (Foucault, 1980), and a place for institutional organization of the learning necessary for a society at a given time (Roldão & Almeida, 2018). Curricular restructuring is therefore a need pointed out by international organizations in several studies carried out (European Commission, 2016; OECD, 2018a, 2018b, 2019; UNESCO, 2015, 2017). Education systems are expected to respond efficiently to the preparation of new generations so that young people face the challenges posed by a global context of uncertainty and rapid and complex changes. In this context, the curricular reorganization movement seems to be underway in some countries, such as Portugal, whose official curricula for basic education have recently been reformulated. The new organization of the curriculum for Basic Education and Secondary Education in Portugal (Portugal, 2018) - resulting from the student's profile - advocates curriculum flexibility and leads to the publication of documents that stipulate the essential learning for each school year and seek to articulate the programs in force with the new orientation of educational policies (Martins et al., 2018). The preliminary analysis of the Portuguese language curriculum led us to question how the relationship between the teaching of the mother tongue and the development of skills in other languages takes place, so we have chosen to analyze the curricula of the last year of secondary education or the equivalent of others four languages: English (UK), Spanish, French, and German. In this context, the objective of this proposal is to analyze comparatively the role of the mother tongue in the development of skills and skills based on the statements of the national curricula of the last year of secondary education in 6 different countries - Germany, Brazil, Spain, France, Portugal, and United Kingdom.

To respond to the objective of this proposal, we use a qualitative methodological approach (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2017), based on the documentary analysis of the official curricular programs of the mother tongue discipline of the six identified countries. We will analyze the six curricula considered in the study using content analysis (Flick, 2009), comparing them based on the following categories: identification of curricular adaptations in the last restructuring of the mother tongue program; approach to the concept of language; identification of skills, attitudes, and values that allow understanding the role of the mother tongue in the development of skills and abilities in the preparation of new generations, to face the challenges posed by a global context of uncertainties, rapid changes, and complexity. The choice of curricular programs in the mother tongue discipline as an empirical object of this study is due to the fact that language is one of the main symbolic systems, through which knowledge is built, personal and social identity is built and culture is produced and interpreted (Bakhtin, 2009). It is through language that the meanings shared by the linguistic-cultural community of which we are all part are accessed, building new concepts and transforming them into actions. The great power of the language is related to its ability to symbolize. That is, to make sense, represent and express the real and the imaginary. The word weaves relationships between individuals, from those inherent in daily life activities to those that lead to the construction of power relations characterized by an ideological bias. This conception of the language and its potential is present in the curricular reformulations, namely in skills that structure the students' profile after leaving compulsory education. This study is part of the exploratory research project "Language why do I want you ?!" One of the aims of the project is to discuss the role of the mother tongue in the development of skills, understood here as the ability to mobilize the knowledge available to achieve a goal, in carrying out processes, in a responsible manner (OECD, 2019). This project is institutionally funded by CeiED- Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Education and Development.

A first general analysis of the curricula shows great similarities between them concerning the conception of mother-tongue teaching. This fact is expected, especially in five of the six countries involved in the analysis whose curricula in force have been restructured in the light of the guidelines and directives provided by the European Union. It should be noted that although the United Kingdom has formally ceased to join this regional bloc on 31 January 2020, the structure of the education system has not yet been changed. The great similarities in terms of the conversion of content by skills can still be justified in the context of the impact that the Theory of Human Capital has, since the 1970s, by reinforcing the close relationship between schooling and the economy. More recently, international organizations such as UNESCO and the OECD indicate in their reports the need to establish a link between education and the world of work through the development of skills. This relationship appears clearly in the objective of sustainable development (SDG) 4 and indirectly in SDG 8 (UNESCO, 2015) and is highlighted in the Education Agenda 2030 which has as one of the main points the emphasis on the acquisition of skills for work (UNESCO, 2017).

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