Promoting Easy-to-Read Language for Social Inclusion Erasmus Project

Project Title

Promoting Easy-to-Read Language for Social Inclusion

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for adult education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Access for disadvantaged; Inclusion – equity; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills

Project Summary

It is estimated that around 25% of the population shows difficulties in reading comprehension for different reasons: intellectual, cultural, social, linguistic, etc. (OECD, 2017).
International and national legislation as, e.g. the UN-Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, promote ‘easy-to-read’ as a fundamental right for equal access and inclusion. Recent EU legislature has made accessible information a responsibility of both the authorities and business enterprises, and in 2009, the “European standards on how to make information easy to read and understand”, compiled by Inclusion Europe were published.

However, these rules and regulations were based more on intuition and purely theoretical notions of complexity (see Bredel and Maaß 2016: 67) than on empirical and experimental evidence. Moreover, many rules are defined quite vaguely, and some are in conflict with one another, for instance, reducing morphological complexity may increase phrasal complexity, which hampers the quality of EtR.

Thus, the project directly targets two big groups: potential Easy to read (EtR) language translators and writers, who are responsible for the development of information for persons with permanently or temporarily limited reading proficiency and the persons with limited reading proficiency like, groups with special communication needs necessitated by cognitive or psychological impairment, low education or critical life events, such as forced migration, elderly people.
The project aims at developing a comparative study of EtR ecology in project countries. All planned IOs of the project will have a comparative angle, thus ensuring an innovative perspective and outputs.

The project developed by the partnerships of research institutions and NGOs sets the following enabling objectives that would logically lead to IO:
1) to conduct a comparative study of the situation in the project countries regarding the acceptance of the EtR by persons with permanently or temporarily limited reading proficiency as well as EtR writers, translators and researchers on the one hand, and the acceptance of the EtR by the society at large on the other hand. The EtR survey will be launched at the onset of the project (Survey 1). The needs analysis performed at the pre-project stage clearly shows that general public at times tend to have reserved or even snobbish attitude towards EtR, and because of negative stereotypes also EtR end-users do not feel comfortable; thus, the project aims to break these stereotypes, make end-users comfortable with EtR and public supportive. The biased attitude towards the EtR among both, end-users and general public is directly related to the concept of social integration, and thus, the dissemination activities throughout the project aim to raise public awareness of the issue, through public discussions and media interviews, thus educating general public and shaping social opinion as well as the multiplier events at the end of the project are set to share the IOs of a project with stakeholders, who will communicate those to a wider audience.The Survey 2, conducted towards the end of the project and posing the same questions to the project target groups will provide for the measurement of the project impact;
2) to devise a comparative study of EtR guidelines as to which of the rule are language specific and which are directly transferable, thus creating the grounds for the analysis of core shared and language-independent aspects which can form the basis of common European training contents. To meet these aim, the empowerment groups within the consortium will develop a research-based linguistic foundation at a more granular and operational level for Latvian and Lithuanian EtR, thus bridging the gap with the third member of the consortium (Slovenia);
3) to compare the training opportunities for EtR translators in the project countries and develop an on-line course, which would give grounds to explore possibilities for future professional certification of EtR translators to enhance recognition of EtR translator career profile;
4) to develop multi-language OER containing dictionaries of synonyms with recommended words complemented by the lists of semantic primes, EtR materials, which might be re-purposed in different training situations;
5) to develop Graded Readers.
6) to develop EtR level descriptors and performance standards;
The international dimension of the project allows to ensure the best practice transfer acquired by the partners through other ERASMUS projects and offers a comparative angle to less spoken languages of the EU (LV, LT, SL). This strategic partnership aims at innovation and good practices to promote literacy and up-skilling through development of methodological and educational materials.

Thus, PERLSI overarching goal is to improve the linguistic and communicative inclusion of cognitively disabled people, elderly people as well as people with other linguistic backgrounds.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 154331 Eur

Project Coordinator

LATVIJAS UNIVERSITATE & Country: LV

Project Partners

• VILNIAUS UNIVERSITETAS
• Zavod RISA, Center za splosno, funkcionalno in kulturno opismenjevanje
• VšĮ Informacijos kaupimo ir sklaidos centras
• Vieglas Valodas agentura