Multilingual Early Language Transmission (MELT) - Mercator ...

5. Recommendations for materials and resources in pre-school
During the last decade, a number of research projects has been carried out. At the same
time, and particularly in Europe, a variety of projects has been initiated on bilingual or
immersion pre-school services. Both the research and the action projects are established to
meet one of the four strategic objectives of the EU program Education and Training 2020 98 :
improving the quality and efficiency of education and training.
General conclusion from these studies is that only qualified caretakers and teachers should
be working with (young) children, and that languages are an essential part of the pre-school
curriculum. It is important that students acquire language awareness and the ability to deal
with different languages at their future workplace. Across Europe, nurseries, day-care
centres, playgroups, pre‐schools and kindergartens are setting the stage for children to learn
two or more languages. In this chapter some studies, projects and development of
methodologies and materials for pre-school are described. Further, the results of
implementing the MELT Guide are presented in paragraph 5.2 and some recommendations
for minority pre-school teachers are presented in the sections about exchanging good
practices in paragraph 5.4.
5.1 Methodologies for pre-school teaching
Sometimes pre-school practitioners have received little specific training and support for
language teaching. Nevertheless, and especially where as soon as the target and instruction
language is a minority language in pre-school, these practitioners are expected to act as
language specialists. Because most materials and methods for pre-school teachers are
intended for majority languages and mostly the materials are intended for children from the
age of 3 or older. The four partners of the MELT project developed a Guide for all pre-school
practitioners working together in a pre-school as well as for practitioners who just start
working in minority or bilingual pre-school settings and who want to improve their
knowledge and skills. This Guide contains language development activities which are
intended for all pre-school settings; pre-school practitioners in nurseries, playgroups, day
care centers and other pre-school professionals dealing with bilingualism and young children
from 0 - 4 years. This Guide provides ideas to create a supportive and rich language
environment in pre-school provisions for children. This Guide aims to make language work as
an integral part of pre-school activities, and that language activities will be of value in the
day to day activities of the pre-school.
The implementing process of the MELT Guide will be described in section 5.2. In the next
section other developed pedagogical approaches and methodologies are presented.
98 “Education and Training 2020” (ET 2020), Council conclusions of 12 May 2009 on a strategic framework for European cooperation in
education and training. It provides common strategic objectives for Member States, including a set of principles for achieving these
objectives, as well as common working methods with priority areas for each periodic work cycle.
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