A summary of the news for April.
Mercator European Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning will organise a European Network of Teacher Training Institutes (ENTTI) meeting on 2-4 June 2009 in Leeuwarden, capitol of Fryslân.
Currently the network contains of a Welsh teacher training institute, several Basque teacher training institutes and two Frisian teacher training institutes. In June some new participants from Estonia, Sweden and Navarre will join the network. Mercator European Research Centre and the Network to Promote Linguistic Diversity (NPLD) are still busy finding new participants from regions with a minority language. The NPLD will cover all travel and accommodation costs of the new participants.
The topics which will be discussed are Integral Language learning, Dealing with varying linguistic backgrounds in the classroom and Student’s linguistic development.
The participants will also visit some primary schools in Fryslân: trilingual primary schools and other interesting schools. Main aim of the meeting is to exchange knowledge and experience and to prepare a future cooperation in a bigger project which will be submitted for EU funding.
For further details and information you can contact Ms. Sieta de Vries on the following email address: sdevries(a)fryske-akademy.nl.
The Conference ‘Multilingualism, Regional & Minority Languages: Paradigms for Languages of the Wider World’, held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, is successfully concluded. The conference took place on the 16th and 17th of April 2009 and was organized by the SOAS - University College London and the Mercator European Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning.
In the two-day conference attended by 200 participants, almost 60 papers have been presented and discussed in 15 parallel sessions. The aim of the conference was to put together different approaches in language transmission and language teaching, drawing from the experiences of Regional and Minority language groups and migrant groups. The use of new technologies in language teaching and the social costs and benefits of multilingualism were central to the conference as well. The keynote presentations of John Edwards (Canada), Viv Edwards (UK), Durk Gorter (Basque Country, Spain), Gerhard Bach (Germany) and Robert Bibeau (Canada) also dealt with the above mentioned themes.
The key issue of the conference was the interaction between researchers from two worlds – Regional and Minority languages and migrant community to bring together the world of languages. According to Cor van der Meer, project coordinator of the Mercator Research Centre the conference “has set a starting point from which these two worlds will find more common grounds and learn from each other”. Besides listening to a number of successful and less successful stories of language transmission and multilingual education, the participants had the opportunity to assist to the development of new paradigms to be applied in the context of minority groups. Concepts like the sustainability of linguistic diversity and the effect of glocalization on minority groups have been introduced and they will most probably appear in future research, too.
During the conference Professor John Edwards from the St. Francis Xavier University in Canada announced that a selection of the papers presented at the conference will be published in a special issue of the International Journal of Multilingual Education.
The Dutch government has decided to study the possibilities of devolving political power from the central government in The Hague to the provincial government of Fryslân, in particular with regard to the Frisian linguistic and cultural affairs.
In preparation of the political debate on these matters the provincial government of Fryslân requested the Mercator Research Centre to do a study on four bilingual and three trilingual regions in Europe where the central governments have devolved some of the political powers to the concerned regions. The Study on the Devolvement of Legislative Power & Provisions is a comparative analysis of eight EU regions with a Regional or Minority Language, including the Frisian region. Read more about this study.
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the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Union.
