cohesion - European Centre for Modern Languages

well as through opportunities to have an impact on policy reform (both within their
own institutions and locally and nationally) towards the development of a vibrant,
high quality and inclusive environment in which multilingualism can flourish.” 3 It
will produce a manual to help associations to disseminate ideas effectively and
will, crucially, evaluate how successful different approaches have been.
The expected contribution of the plurilingual education strand
The mission of the ECML is to stimulate innovation and to provide support to the
practical application of Council of Europe policies. The area of plurilingual education
is one where one could say that there is a good deal of hopeful statement of political
ideals but rather less actual success in widespread application of these ideals. The
projects in the strand seek to remedy this by working on:
the development of sound theoretical bases for the pluralistic approaches which are
a requirement for the change and innovation which will be needed to make
genuinely plurilingual education a reality;
comprehensive, coherent descriptions of the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed
to develop curricula, produce materials and choose appropriate didactic
approaches;
examples of good practice in two crucial areas of plurilingual education – how
languages are to be taught in areas where there are one or more minority
languages, and the strategies for teaching the “majority language” as a subject area
in schools where not all the learners have this as an L1;
the establishment of networks and the creation of resources, available on websites,
to support change and innovation in these areas;
a systematic approach to how ECML projects can be disseminated through
teachers’ association and thus used much more widely.
3 Project description of the LACS project at www.ecml.at
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