Majority and Minority Languages in School Environment: Helping teachers, pupils and parents Erasmus Project

Project Title

Majority and Minority Languages in School Environment: Helping teachers, pupils and parents

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 school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Pedagogy and didactics; Migrants’ issues

Project Summary

The MaMLiSE Project (Majority and Minority Languages in School Environment) intends to offer a new approach to reducing disparities in engaging with formal education among children of migrant background (CMG) and strengthening their families as active agents in shaping the linguistic portrait of society. In principle, the project is directed to teachers of all school subjects, especially of the majority language in a given country and sciences. By acquiring new skills and competencies, teachers will also be more empowered in their profession.

We plan to create better educational opportunities for CMB at schools by helping their teachers and parents to become better children supporters. To this objective, the project team will cooperate, exchange experience and build knowledge on migrant integration at schools in order to develop, test and implement innovative teaching and parental support practices. Specifically, the project will:
1) help teachers to adjust teaching materials and the language of instruction to the level of CMB’s competence in the mainstream language
2) help CMB’s parents understand the way in which they contribute to family language policy (FLP) and learn how they can model their children’s second language development.

Project rationale
There are more and more CMB at schools in the EU. Usually, they are dispersed in a particular country and in a given class there may be one or just a few CMB. This causes that they are often the neglected minority during the lesson. Sadly, CMB are outperformed by non-migrant students, are less likely to complete secondary school and follow less demanding careers.
Researchers in education for some time now have been highlighting the need for proper educational provision for CMB to foster their school and societal inclusion. Investing in the effectiveness of instructional provision across different school subjects is an important element in facilitating CMB’s school integration and performance. Our needs analysis indicates, however, that teachers lack competence and training opportunities to become more effective in fostering inclusion and better school results for CMB. For example, they do not know how to adjust their language of instruction so that learners who are less advanced in the mainstream language could profit from their teaching more. To be successful instructors in such settings, they need to have at their disposal a mix of awareness, knowledge, and skills, which so far have not been included in teacher training curricula. What’s urgently needed is a coherent approach to teacher education in this respect. This project also targets parents of CMB as, to the best of our research review, not much assistance is provided to them either.
Therefore, our planned results are:
-increasing the awareness of the benefits and difficulties which plurilingualism at schools and home environment may bring about;
-offering teachers materials and training opportunities which will equip them with competencies and knowledge to better perform during lessons in linguistically and culturally heterogeneous classes. Material evidence of achieving this aim will be the outputs produced in the project, esp. IO1-IO3;
-by helping teachers to develop the revised expertise, we hope to empower them to bring about a systemic change, which will strengthen their professional position. Evidence of these changes will be published in open access journals (IO5);
-helping parents of CMB understand the way in which they contribute to FLP and offering them strategies of fostering plurilingualism at the family level. We hope to achieve it by enabling parents’ access to OERs, including guidelines and video tutorials (IO4).
-increasing the awareness of all agents relevant to the field of school education, including researchers and in- and pre-service teacher instructors (evidence: research reports IO5, IO1).
In order to produce these results, all consortium partners plan to work towards 5 innovative intellectual outputs (IO1-IO5) by means of collective effort and exchange of knowledge and good practices. To enable enhanced peer learning in our partnership, we plan to carry out 2 short-term trainings (C1-C2). Furthermore, because we strive for producing quality outputs in our project, we plan to test the materials elaborated in it during pilot trainings of teachers in each partner country and by means of 4 long-term teaching placements (C3-C6) to ensure collecting more nuanced feedback. To ensure smooth cooperation of the partners and to manage workflow, 6 transnational project meetings are planned (PM1-PM6). Various dissemination activities are also included in the project activities to inform a wider community of school practitioners and decision-makers about our outputs and results and to ensure sustainability for the project. We plan to achieve this goal not only by means of dissemination events (E1- E5) but, primarily, by tight cooperation with our extensive list of associated partners

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 346937 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIWERSYTET IM. ADAMA MICKIEWICZA W POZNANIU & Country: PL

Project Partners

• UNIVERSITY OF LIMERICK
• UNIVERSITAET BIELEFELD
• Ośrodek Doskonalenia Nauczycieli w Poznaniu
• SECOND JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL OF IOANNINA INTERCULTURAL EDUCATION
• UNIVERSITAET BREMEN
• INSTITOUTO TECHNOLOGIAS YPOLOGISTONKAI EKDOSEON DIOFANTOS