Generation Global: Multilingualism and intercultural skills for a dual-competency workforce of the future Erasmus Project

Project Title

Generation Global: Multilingualism and intercultural skills for a dual-competency workforce of the future

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 higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Teaching and learning of foreign languages; Labour market issues incl. career guidance / youth unemployment; Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning

Project Summary

In Europe we need young people with strong multilingual and intercultural skills who can tackle the challenges that arises in European societies and especially the labour market in the future. The European Commission as well as the Council of Europe have elaborated policies to support multilinguism and interculturalism in order to enhance businesses’ competitiveness and citizens’ mobility and employability, e.g. “European Strategy for Multilingualism: Benefits and Cost” (2016). The motivation theories are already available (Dörnyei et al., 2014). We propose to apply these to energise young people to perform better multilingual and intercultural skills. An example for this is ‘creating the vision’, that is, to construct vision of who they could become as multilingual users and what knowing several languages could add to their lives.
However, recent findings on European level (http://ec.europa.eu/education/policy/multilingualism_en) or on local (national) level, for ex. in the “Danish National Language Strategy” (2017), show that there is a large percentage of young people who do not have sufficient language skills, and, simultaneously, there is a growing demand for multilingual labour market. This project addresses both challenges.
The project has three primary target groups. Within, the project, we will attempt to path the complex relationships among the different target groups that exist and can increase the awareness of young people and their motivation to become more proficient in different languages and more interculturally competent. The running of the project consists in three steps:
The first target group is business. The dialogue between education and business is vital if the supply of language skills from education systems is to be better matched to the needs of the labour market. The task of the businesses (our associated partner in this project) is to help define a profile for the multilingual workforce and create a demand for it. The second target group are career staff/consultants, policy makers, school leaders, university staff, and curricula writers. Associated partners from this group will help to provide and find a practical solution regarding the dual competence based on the demand from business. The third target group of the project are young people – both European citizens, and migrants and refugees. Teachers and parents have to be also included in the third and the last phase of the project. Ideally, the young people, participating in the project, should be motivated, they should welcome the solutions proposed in the previous two steps, and finally, try to implement the guidelines proposed here.
The project aims:
– To change attitude toward language learning, more specifically to increase the awareness of value of multilingualism (foreign languages and mother tongue languages) as well as Intercultural Communicative Competences (ICC) as dual competences,
– To increase awareness in careers/skills organisations and staff to be more knowledgeable about dual competences and languages/ICC skills relevance,
– To elicit employers and businesses to recognise and demand Languages and ICC skills,
– To equip the users better for the labour market through an increased level of languages and cultural knowledge and thus combat skills deficit that currently exits,
– To develop, test and implement innovative approaches to motivate young people to choose more languages and be aware of intercultural similarities and differences.
To achieve these aims, the project’s team will design and create a website, which will be updated as the project progresses, being one of the final products at the end of the project. To do this, short videos for the website presenting professionally successful people who combined their multilingual skills with another profession, will be created. Guidance for different audiences (i.e. language teachers, career staff, parents, etc.) will be also elaborated as well as examples of good practices and case-studies. The official start of the project will symbolically be on the 26th September – the European Day of Languages when Europe is celebrating the language and cultural diversity. The dissemination plan includes local events in every partner country as well as involvement at interdisciplinary events organised by the key-organisations (e.g. business conference, parent conference, career advisors) to promote project’s development, get feedback and present ongoing results. We also plan school visits where we can meet young people.
The long-term impact of the project should be to initiate changes in the national curricula and to create integrated studies and new study programmes. The guidelines from this project will pave the way to move the language studies towards a more functional and communicative approach in line with needs of the businesses, the global society and cultural understanding, thereby increasing the young people employability and skills in general.

Project Website

https://scilt.org.uk/Employment/GenerationGlobal/tabid/8311/Default.aspx

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 144234 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITY OF STRATHCLYDE & Country: UK

Project Partners

• AARHUS UNIVERSITET
• HOGSKOLEN I OSTFOLD