Reading-Comprehension Cross-border United with Intercomprehension network opened for + youngs Erasmus Project

Project Title

Reading-Comprehension Cross-border United with Intercomprehension network opened for + youngs

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 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills; Teaching and learning of foreign languages

Project Summary

Lectŭrĭo in Latin means “I feel like reading”. This is why the project name Lectŭrĭo+ was chosen.
How can we help very young children, who are not yet readers, to get into the written world ? How can we encourage this very young audience to develop a desire to read and to learn? Through the Lectŭrĭo+ project we seeked to convince people that this can be achieved by combining stories for kids with multilingualism issues. From September 2017 to November 2019, the seven project partners and their eleven associate partners pursued this idea with conviction. They proposed a set of open educational and training resources. Every resource created within the framework of the Lectŭrĭo+ project is available on the public web site of the project. The resources are designed to be enriched continuously.
The Lectŭrĭo+ project brought together three different types of organizations. Coordinated by an association, Apicad, the project was carried out with as well the school sector (represented by a vocational high school, the Lycée Le Mas Blanc), as the university sector (represented by five universities). Some of these were already working with a network of schools, and all have more or less a vast experience with issues of plurilingualism in the field of education : the universities of Barcelona, Corsica, Rome 3, Salento, and Saarland. The partnership had four countries involved : Germany, Spain, France and Italy. Their partner organisations were mainly located in regions where several languages are in use, in cross-border regions, as well as in island or rural plurilingual regions. The associated partners extended the area of influence to also include Romania and, on the American continent, Argentina. In these regions, a wide range of languages with all possible status are in use, and constitute a very rich environment for doing research on this topic. Not only the education systems are diverse, but the different forms of care of the main target audience, children between three and six years of age, are also rich thanks to their differences.
This audience of very young children, who do not yet read or are at the very beginning of writing, is not the only target audience. Another target group is schoolchildren in agricultural vocational education who’s career plan is to work in the socio-educational field, and particularly with children between three and six years of age. In addition to these two basic groups, attention has also been paid to pupils with so-called special educational needs – even if they are over 6 – in order to respond to dyslexic disorders.
It then remains evident that all the actors being involved in the education of young children are among the target audiences. This starts with teachers and other professionals in contact with the very young public in the exercise of their profession, without fundamentally forgetting the families themselves.
The Lectŭrĭo+ partnership had beforehand identified the need for comprehensive social care in education, and particularly in the education of the very young. For this reason they wanted to respond to these needs by setting realistic and concrete objectives. This is why, in addition to resources and training, the partnership has committed itself to design a system for learning in a family context, involving the school as well. The description of this system is part of the available documents on the project’s web site.
In the field of multilingualism, the associated didactics, and the teaching techniques already in place, very little work had been done for a very young audience and dyslexic children. The Lectŭrĭo+ project has produced in two Pluralistic Approaches (intercomprehension and language awareness) and has digitally transposed the “Story Bags”, from which it has drawn much inspiration. It was able to benefit from the long experience of the italian Valle d’Aosta region, an associate partner. The “Story Bags” are a pedagogical technique based on short bilingual texts.
It is therefore innovative to have chosen this type of public, in the same way as the approach of cross-fertilisation between school and socio-educational sectors and families also is innovative.
The Lectŭrĭo+ project focuses on the positive effects of disseminating educational resources and practices. In the long run it aims to combat school failure and early drop-out. It enables to set up a network of schools being engaged in these approaches.
The Lectŭrĭo+ project will continue and last. In fact, it has set up a sharing practice between the project actors through a sustainable exchange network and regular, hybrid or online training sessions. All the achievements of the project can be improved but also complemented by new ones over time. The project’s coordinating organisation is committed to this approach. The “corpus of tales” already reaches hundreds of web pages, and the created resources based on the emblematic tale « Thomas and the watermelon » invite to be creative.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 161612 Eur

Project Coordinator

Association internationale pour la promotion de l’intercompréhension à distance & Country: FR

Project Partners

• Fédération Régionale des Maisons Familiales Rurales d’Occitanie
• Lycée le Mas Blanc
• UNIVERSITA DEL SALENTO
• UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA
• UNIVERSITE DE CORSE PASCAL PAOLI
• UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI ROMA TRE
• UNIVERSITAT DES SAARLANDES