A platform of authentic materials for children and young teens developed by children and young teens!
Maria Heron
Maria Heron
Learning from others of the same age is the idea behind the new platform palm-edu.eu which wants to make the learning of foreign languages attractive for children in the European Union.
The Erasmus+ project PALM (Promoting Authentic Language Acquisition in Multilingual Contexts) will design a platform of authentic materials for children and young teenagers developed by the children and teenagers themselves. By the end of the project in August 2018, the platform will contain 1500 texts and 250 activities in 8 different languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Hungarian, Greek and Ladin, a minority language spoken in South Tyrol.
For teachers, the site is a resource for learning and teaching materials, as well as assessment tools, to go with various input texts developed by trainee teachers for piloting. They will then report back on the usefulness of texts and materials using short on-line surveys to provide feedback.
NILE, represented by Maria Heron, is one of the partners in this project which is being co-ordinated by Prof. Claudia Mewald of the Pedagogic University of Lower Austria. The team, which includes partners from Cyprus, Italy, Hungary, Austria and the UK, have been meeting twice a year and are meeting again next week in Bressanone in South Tyrol. They will be working on the platform but also planning and preparing for the first intralanguage gathering with some of the children and teachers in Bressanone in May and for the final junior symposium in Baden in June 2018. These gatherings will provide opportunities for plurilingual and intercultural exchange.
From left to right:
- Renata Zanin from Libera Universita Di Bolzano
- Dina Tzagari from the University of Cyprus
- Claudia Mewald from University College of Teacher Education, Lower Austria, Baden
- Maria Heron from NILE in the UK
- Sabine Wallner from University College of Teacher Education, Lower Austria, Baden
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