BABEL

RATIONALE FOR INTERVENTION
According with the articles 165 and 166 of the “Treaty on the Functioning of European Union” and with several conclusions of the European Council on multilingualism, teaching and learning foreign languages should be based on new assessment methods and multilingual and pedagogical materials . This is the reason why multilingualism is one important priority of the Erasmus + Programme.
Immigration is an ongoing and substantial process within the EU borders. Lots of young people born within these borders, belong to families of foreign origins. These boys and girls often need to bridge a cognitive gap between the mother tongue of their family and the language of the country they live in. In some of the European educational systems, there’s a lack of competences to address this kind of situation and it’s not rare that some of these pupils have bad performance and leave the school before finish it. Even though they often know two or more languages, these skills are not considered and hone by the schools, just because they’re not official European languages. For these reasons, all over Europe it’s possible to find associations organizing L2 language courses aiming to enhance linguistic competences of immigrants.
By the other side, the geo-political history of many European countries teaches us that ethno-linguistic minorities has always been considered in opposing ways: some countries aim for their recognition and valorisation; some others are involved in serious political conflicts.
Nowadays, European Institutions recognize the huge added value of multilingualism in the individual and common development. This project is conceived to explore the opportunities that a multilingual non formal didactic approach could have on the intercultural integration. We believe that to hone the language skills of these young people will have two positive effects: on one hand, a better integration for them all and, on the other hand, the acquisition of new language competences to be spent on the job market.

OBJECTIVES
The main aim of this project is to promote a didactic approach that fosters the diversity of young people and teenagers mother tongues, in order to accelerate their integration process and to encourage the intercultural exchanges among young Europeans.
BABEL specific objectives are:
• To enhance the linguistic competences and to promote the development of a conscious point of view of young people on multilingual non formal didactic;
• To deepen the knowledge related to current and past multilingualism in participant countries, sustaining the direct involvement of young people;
• To foster the language competences of educators and to develop innovative practices for the teaching and the assessment of new language skills;
• To support active citizenship of young people involved in the project and to improve their linguistic mediation competences through “a peer to peer” approach.

IMPLEMENTATION
These objectives will be pursued by means of activities organized transnationally and in single countries. These will generate intellectual outputs relevant within the whole European Union. They will involve informal and non-formal education and training organizations active in the youth field.
The project will be developed through two different kind of actions:
• Training activities, dedicated to educators from the third sector organizations (transnational activity) and to young people participating to their activities and events;
• Intellectual outputs, related to the development of instruments for a better comprehension of multilingualism and its assessment. In particular, we would like to implement an action-research, a training module, new tools for the certification of multilingual competences and a multilingual web portal.

DEADLINE: 30/04/2015