The kick-off meeting of the project POLYGLOT – Multilingual education in preschool age was held from 13th to 14th November 2014 in Innsbruck, Austria. The project is co-funded by the Erasmus + Programme, Key Action 2 – Strategic Partnerships in the field of school education, and it aims to foster early language learning by helping children in kindergartens develop linguistic competences and promoting multilingual education across Europe.
Europe is an increasingly multicultural environment, and in such a context there is a strong need for multilingual education from an early age. Many people living in Europe are bilingual, some live in border regions, others have a migration background. In all these cases, language enhancement role is critical to ease intercultural dialogue as well as to improve people’s employability and vocational opportunities. On top of this, children with a migration background are often reported to have problems in both their first and second languages, and educators lack the specific tools to address the need of bilingual children.
In a long term perspective, the project POLYGLOT intends to encourage language learning starting from pre-school age, also considering that children are particularly receptive towards languages at an early age. For this reason, the activities envisaged within the POLYGLOT project are specifically targeted to educators, parents and their bilingual children.
The first phase of the project will be dedicated to a research aiming to analyse the current situation in the field of bilingual and multilingual education in kindergartens. At the same time, another analysis will be carried out in all partner countries, in order to identify web-based Open Educational Resources (OER) that are suitable to promote bilingual education for children in pre-school age.
Based on the two state of the art reports that will be produced to collect all these findings, educators and parents will be involved in a pilot training, using different training materials, including guides on the use of OER to support language acquisition both in kindergartens and in the home setting, and two e-learning courses respectively addressed to parents and educators.
The pilot training will therefore involve both educators and parents, and will serve as a basis to improve and finalise the e-learning courses on how to use OER to foster multilingual education.
The consortium, which is made up of six partners, believes that the project will help raise awareness about the importance of language learning from an early age and will therefore contribute to promote bilingualism and multilingualism in all partner countries and beyond.
Project partners:
- Kindervilla (Austria) – Coordinator
- CESIE (Italy)
- Baby Erasmus (Spain)
- İzmir Özel Fatih Koleji İşletmeleri (Turkey)
- First Private School Leonardo Da Vinci (Bulgaria)
- CARDET – Centre For Advancement Of Research And Development In Educational Technology (Cyprus)
For further information about the project please contact: francesca.vacanti@cesie.org
The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein
