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Italian team
Catalan team
French team (associate teachers)
These are the results from a project of the European Centre for Modern Languages within its "Empowering Language Professionals" programme 2008-2011.
This website results from a project run within the ECML's (European Centre for Modern Languages) Empowering Language Professionals programme entitled "EBP-ICI; Minority Languages, Collateral Languages and Bi- /plurilingual Education".
Based on European objectives to favour linguistic diversity and plurilingual and pluricultural education, the project aims at developing experimentations, activities and didactic tools at primary school level which, in an integrated didactic framework, would associate dominant languages, minority or regional languages in various European regions where language contact is a reality: Catalonia, Scotland, some regions of France (Corsica, Catalonia, Occitania), the Val d'Aoste. The languages we are dealing with will be used as stepping stones to work on two continuums (through interlinguistic activities or intercomprehension related activities): linguistic, geographic and cultural proximities (collateral or near languages, neighbouring languages, heritage languages) as well as a variational continuum (varieties of the dominant language, interlects). The aim will be to develop some form of conscious awareness and to promote an undertanding of language variation at an early age, as well as to enable children to develop meta and interlinguistic competences in order to help them to develop their own linguistic repertoires and plurilingual competences.
The diversity of contexts, of school and sociolinguistics statuses of the minority languages involved in the project, the diversity of issues in terms of integration and the diversity of configurations this implies in terms of curricular organisation are to be considered as an asset in order to consider the elaboration of basic principles towards a plurilingual education as well as an integrated didactic organisation which would take all languages present on a given territory (language ecosystem) into account.
The EBP-ICI publication and website result from the work of an international network established within one of the ECML projects. We would like to thank all who worked on EBP-ICI, in particular the project coordination team for their motivation and active involvement.