What was the project about?
The project will pilot and assess the concept of a plurilingual, inclusive and intercultural whole school policy comprising majority and minority, regional, heritage and neighbouring languages. It will provide tools which help to clarify, develop and implement plurilingual, intercultural and inclusive whole school policies in different contexts in ECML member states.
Abstract
The goal of the project is to pilot and assess the concept of a plurilingual, inclusive and intercultural whole school policy which not only comprises majority and minority languages but also regional, heritage and neighbouring languages. Our whole school policy is designed in such a way that languages taught as subjects are not treated in isolation and language and non-language instruction overlap so that all subject teaching is also language teaching. This consistent implementation of content-based language(s) instruction will be transferable to all non-language content lessons; the languages to be used will be languages already present at a given institution. Our whole school policy will eventually overcome the barriers of subject as well as of age-group divisions.
Learners of all ages will work in appropriate groups on broad, comprehensive topics such as "blood", "currency" or "nature" from various angles and perspectives using the languages that they have at their disposal. The teaching concept is based on models such as the Nyckel skola in Södertälje, Sweden, and the Gesamtschule Waldau in Kassel, Germany. The aim of our project will be to take the ideas developed for multilingual education in project schools further by enriching the language palette available for teachers to teach with and learners to learn from.The multilingual approach to language learning also means that learners get insights into the structure of languages, study possibilities of positive transfer and interferences between the languages they use, train productive and receptive skills, develop metalinguistic and crosslinguistic awareness as well as language learning strategies and strategies of language use.