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Minority languages, good travelling companions
Minority languages, good travelling companions
Start date: Sep 1, 2015,
End date: Aug 31, 2017
PROJECT
FINISHED
PARTICIPANTS AND CONTEXT:
Three schools are participating in this strategic partnership: the applicant is Laskorain Ikastola (Tolosa, Basque Country, Spain) and our two partners are Humaniora Kindsheid Jesu (Hasselt, Flanders, Belgium) and Istituto di Istruzione Superiore San Giuseppe Calasanzio (Sanluri, Sardinia, Italy). A total of 435 students (aged 16-18) will be actively involved in the project and many more will be benefited.
This strategic partnership has been established on the basis of a common interest in the issue of minority languages. Basque is the main language in our school and we looked for partners who might learn from our positive experience with Basque and/or who could help our students improve their linguistic and digital competences in a European dimension. Sardinian language is recognized as a minority language in Europe, but unlike Basque, it is still not an academic language at school. Their Government is planning to introduce Sardinian at school in the future and San Giuseppe Calasanzio plans to be one of the first bilingual schools on the island. Belgium is a very interesting country linguistically speaking, as it is officially trilingual, with a different official language (French, Flemish- Dutch spoken in Flanders- and German) depending on the region, although it wasn’t always the case. We are very interested in knowing the ins and outs of the evolution of Flemish.
Another innovative point is the complete digitalization of the project as ICT collaborative tools are indispensable nowadays.
OBJECTIVES: We would like our students:
1. To improve their linguistic competence in English by giving them the opportunity to get involved in a project with an international and European dimension which will definitely imply using English with a communicative and practical aim.
2. To improve their digital competence by using and creating ICT tools to collaborate with their foreign partners.
3. To know what other minority and/or endangered languages exist in Europe, what their sociolinguistic situation is and what policies are being applied to promote their survival.
4. To increase and help others increase the use of the minority languages at school and in our everyday life, by involving students in a project where some of them will demonstrate and others find out that the flourishing of a minority language is possible and that living in that minority language can come true.
SUMMARY OF PROJECT ACTIVITIES:
a) Students will prepare slides to introduce themselves to their partner students.
b) We will carry out a survey among High School students in order to check how much they know about minority languages.
c) Information and research activities about minority languages in Europe.
d) Students will prepare questionnaires for their host families to find out what the real situation of their language is.
e) Students will create subtitles in English and the three minority languages for the lyrics of video clips using an online application.
f) the creation of a corpus of expressions that any traveller might need, in English and minority languages.
TRANSNATIONAL LEARNING ACTIVITIES:
A selected number of students from each school will visit the partner schools and carry out an exchange with students there. During those visits, they will: a) carry out a survey among the host families to find out about their linguistic reality. b) explain and present their own situation to students and host families. c) put into practice the sections of the multilingual guide they will have prepared before the visits, and they will add new expressions to the guide as a consequence of real needs in the foreign country.
INTELLECTUAL OUTPUT
In this project we are going to elaborate a mobile application with around 600-1000 expressions that any speaker of English will find useful when travelling in Sardinia, in the Basque Country or in Flanders / Netherlands; it will also be useful for any Basque, Sardinian or Flemish speaker travelling in Europe as they will be able to find the appropriate expression in English. The guide will include four languages: English, Basque, Sardinian and Flemish (Dutch spoken in Flanders). The guide will cover the most relevant contexts a traveller might face.
IMPACT, DISSEMINATION AND SUSTAINABILITY
We wil publish all the outputs and findings in public project websites and we have designed a complete plan of activities to disseminate our results locally, regionally and internationally so we expect a wide impact.
The application, which will be published on AppStore, Google Play and Windows MarketPlace and anybody will be able to download for free, will be launched in a multiplier event that will take place in the Tolosa Puppets International Center known as “Topic”.
Collaboration among us in the field of minority languages will continue after the end of the project, and we expect our students to keep online relations as well.