Key activity Languages - Multilateral projects: New Materials / Online Courses / Awareness Raising
Objectives and description of the action
The Languages Key Activity provides support for Multilateral Projects that promote language awareness and access to language learning resources and/or develop and disseminates language learning materials, including online courses and instruments for language testing. Projects may address one or both of these areas. However, duplication of existing products or methodologies, particularly those developed with European funding, must be avoided. All languages (European official languages and regional and minority languages, migrant languages and the languages of significant trading partners) may be targeted, provided that the proposed activities are relevant to European multilingualism policy, show a clear European added value and are additional to the work done at local, regional and national level.Nevertheless, the Languages Key Activity devotes a significant part of its resources to encouraging the learning of European official languages as foreign languages in order to help European citizens to understand better each other’s cultures and outlooks, and to enable them to take advantage of the freedom to work or study in another Member State. To make better use of the ‘additionality’ of European intervention, and so as not to compete with what is already assured at national level by Member States, the Languages Key Activity focuses mainly on the teaching of a second or further language, notably less widely used and taught languages (LWULT).
Within the priorities announced in the General Call for Proposals, the following activities may be supported:
- Awareness raising activities, e.g.: promotion of languages; information about language learning opportunities; improvement of access to language learning facilities. The main target group is people with little or no experience of language learning, or who are reluctant language learners. Projects that address this area, either wholly or partly, must therefore give people the information, the motivation and the support they need to go and learn a language. Projects should also include partners who are capable of reaching a broad and often reluctant target audience and convincing them of the benefits of language learning.
- Development and dissemination of language learning materials, e.g.: creating, adapting, refining or exchanging one or more of the following products: educational media/materials for foreign language teaching; methods and tools designed to recognise/evaluate language skills; curricula and language learning methodologies.
The aim is to encourage innovation in the development of effective and high quality language learning and teaching tools for all sectors of education, in a life long learning perspective and to provide a wider variety of language teaching materials to clearly defined groups, by encouraging the production of language tools which are commercially under-represented or difficult to market on a large scale, either because of the target group, the languages chosen or the nature of the educational approach involved. Whenever appropriate, the use of the Common European Framework for Languages from the Council of Europe is strongly recommended. Dictionaries and data bases are not considered in themselves to be extensive language learning tools, and therefore their production does not fall within the scope of this Key Activity.
Language expertise
For projects concerned with the development of pedagogical materials for the learning of specific languages, the consortium must include organisations that represent the community of each of the target languages. These organisations have the role of ensuring that pedagogical content is accurate and culturally appropriate. Consequently organisations from the eligible countries where the target languages are recognised (i.e. used / spoken as national, regional/minority languages) must be present in the consortium. For each target language that has the status of a national, regional or minority language of a country that is not eligible to participate in the LLP (such as Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese etc), the consortium must include at least one organisation, established in one of the countries eligible to participate in the LLP, that teaches the language(s) concerned. For projects concerned more with awareness-raising than the creation of pedagogical content, these requirements are strongly recommended where appropriate, but not compulsory.
These issues will be judged at 2 levels in the selection procedure. At a formal level, a check will be made to ensure that each target language is specifically and appropriately represented within the consortium in the context of the eligibility of the application. In the context of the Award criteria, experts will be invited to assess the quality of the specific expertise presented in the consortium.
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