boosting bilingualism

The Heuropa! project partners TU Dresden and fictionfarmer! attended the “International Spielmarkt Potsdam” (International games fair) in Potsdam, Germany on 26 and 27 April 2013 to present first impressions of the new Heuropa! platform (amongst other language learning games). The games fair was well attended by teachers and parents but also by many children who liked to try out anything on display, including the computer language learning adventures by the Heuropa! project!

Get in touch with the Heuropa!-Project at the PL-CALL-Conference (http://pl-call.pl/) in Warsaw at the University of Social Sciences, 9-10 May 2013. We are presenting the project and its approach in the section Game-based learning.

Please find our conference abstract here.

The results of a another study on the advantages of bilingualism were published in “The Journal of Neuroscience” in their current issue from January 2013: http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/2/387
The researchers have shown that lifelong bilingualism can maintain youthful cognitive control abilities in aging.

The study was also the topic of a news article in the German science blog “Wissenschaft aktuell”:
http://www.wissenschaft-aktuell.de/artikel/Zweisprachigkeit_haelt_das_Gehirn_im_Alter_fit1771015588876.html

Czech

Lituanian

Polish

There is an interesting visualisation of language knowledge in Europe here.
The page shows how many people (in percentage) speak a language as a mother tounge and how many speak it as a learnt, i.e. foreign language. The graphs look very interesting. Take German as an example: Although it is a known fact that German is the most spoken language in Europe - the long, 94% scale for German speakers is overwhelming. English comes second, but the percentage of the total English speakers is only a third of that of German speakers.   
http://languageknowledge.eu/

On monday 27th of August 2012 the fourth international conference of the “Czech school without Borders” (Česká škola bez hranic) took place in Prague. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, representatives and club members met to share experiences. They all paid tribute to the good and important work that has been done in the recent years.

Lucie Slavíková-Boucher, founder of the Czech school without borders

  Read more about the meeting’s results and comments:

auf Deutsch: Radio Praha, Český rozhlas 7: Lehrpläne, Weiterbildung, Vernetzung - Tschechische Schule ohne Grenzen

česky: Radio Praha, ČR 7: “České školy bez hranic se znovu setkaly v Praze”

How to make reading an adventure? The Dresden team of the Czech school without borders and involved parents invited bilingual children to a reading night. 24 kids stayed together a whole night at the premises where they use to meet listenting to stories and poems of Czech authors.

The little readers could, too, embark on a journey through the ancient world, play dice with the little mole or bake a rather unusual cake with the dog and the cat, inspired by Josef Capek.

Inspired? Read more (in Czech only): www.csbh.cz/drazdany

A linguistics professor at the University of Konstanz in Germany, Prof. Janet Grijzenhout, recently gave a very interesting interview on the positive effects of  multilingualism to the German newspaper “Südkurier”. In particular, she spoke about the bilingual education of children: what is best in this repect, which factors have a positive effect which factors could be a hindrance. 

The interview is highly relevant for the heuropa! project as it supports many assumptions on plurilingual education which the project is based on.  

If you can read German, please find the whole interview here:
“Mehrsprachigkeit hat positive Effekte” (pdf file)

(Source: suedkurier.de)

“From Migration to Integration” is the title of a recent conference held in Copenhagen, 1-2 October 2011, by the Nordic Union of Polish Education.
The conference especially discussed the integration of Polish pupils into northern European societies.

Beata Howe from the Association of Polish Teachers Abroad, one of Heuropa’s team members, brought into focus the migration of Poles to the United Kingdom and the their bilingualism:

Beata Howe: “Migration and bilingualism - Migracja a dwujęzyczność” (abstract)