The Kaleco project
Individual multilingualism (i.e. an individual’s ability to communicate is several languages) remains an important challenge for the EU. Europe is a continent characterised by many different linguistic traditions, the legacy of ancient cultures, yet whose population is still largely monolingual. Integration cannot be achieved by the reliance on one language at the expense of marginalizing or suppressing the other language and cultures have constituted European history. Yet multilingualism is not an easy goal to achieve; the learning of other languages is a complex and often difficult task for any individual. One of the major obstacles is the ‘foreignness’ of foreign languages. Education systems cannot rely solely on reforms in curriculum delivery and pedagogic methods, an interest in languages and the cultures they embody needs to be encouraged by local language initiatives. It is through positive local initiatives that opportunity for real multilingualism can be achieved in most local and national European contexts. The KALECO project took as its starting point the observation that where multilingualism in Europe enjoys greatest success is where initiatives have been set up which value inclusion of the varied linguistic and cultural experiences that are represented locally.
The consortium driving the project is made up of partners from countries where the populations have varying degrees of foreign language capability, from Sweden and Estonia where competence in other languages is high to Great Britain and Italy where, for different reasons, multilingual competence is less common. The partnership of 11 different institutions (universities, local authorities, cultural associations, training bodies, educational advisory groups) represents 8 different countries, each with its own tapestry of language history and geography. The diversity within the partnership will allow a wide range of resources to be brought together to compare language policies and language learning initiatives and a wide range of experiences of different contexts to be shared.
The project aims to design and then pilot a number of initiatives which will provide the opportunity for those involved to enjoy engagement with learning languages and becoming plurilingual. The outcome will be a language platform tailored to a range of different contexts and the construction of a sustainable network which will continue to grow and to develop its capacity.
Coherently with the theme of the project, we’ll have two communication languages: English and French. But our final aim is that each partner employs his “elective” language and understands all the languages spoken in the consortium.
