 Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us today. This is the first time we meet after the summer break and I hope that everyone managed to enjoy it given this special circumstances this year. So welcome to the Sematic Webinar organized by the School Education Gateway, the initiative of European Union, a place to engage with European policy and practice for school education. My name is Ina and my colleague Asi. I'd like to support this webinar today which will be dedicated to language education. Today we'll talk about the diverse linguistic and cultural landscape of Europe, as well as discover practices that ensure multilingual education is available to all. So our first speaker, Leticia Tringanotto, a researcher at Indira National Institute for Documentation, Innovation and Education Research, will provide us with the result of Indira Language Survey with a focus on current policy discussion on language learning, teaching and assessing. And Professor John Andoni Dunabaitia, a researcher in cognitive science of language, will tell us about bilingual and trilingual schools in the BASC education system. Finally, Sambrina Resom, a vice chair of the Network to Promote Linguistic Diversity, will put a spotlight on the project that is aimed at implementing classroom activities on the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. So before giving the floor to our speakers, I would like to point out that the session will be recorded and the recording will be available on the webinar page together with a presentation of our speakers. In the meantime, you can pose your questions in the chat box and we will make sure that we can we will come back to as many questions as possible in the end of the webinar. So Leticia, if you are ready, I'm happy to give you the floor. You can unmute your microphone and move your slides yourself and start your presentation. Thank you. So first of all, I love everybody. It's a great pleasure to be here. Thank you to the Education Gateway and European Commission for this invitation. I'm honored and privileged to be here during the week of the European Day of Languages. And it's such a pleasure to see my teachers are here with us today from all over the world. I've seen people also from Mexico and a lot of participants from Italy as well. So it's a great pleasure. Thank you very much. So I'm a researcher at Indira, which is the National Institute for Education, Innovation and Educational Research in Italy and in cooperation with the Minister of Education. So today I'm going to provide with some insights about the research, the latest research that we are carrying out in the latest period. We'd like to start with this quotation, which is one of my favorite. Monolingualism is a curable disease. And that's why we are all here today to celebrate plural lingualism and minority languages and all this diversity, language diversity in Europe, but also at global level. So just to give you an idea of the different topics I'm going to deal with today. As I was saying, the latest Italian research that we are conducting at Indira, in cooperation with the Ministry of Education. And so I'm going to talk about, first of all, our pilot project on CFR, CV, which is the latest version of the European Framework of Reference, Companion Volume, published in just in 2000 by the Council of Europe, 2020, sorry, by the Council of Europe. And so we've been piloting a project in cooperation with the Ministry of Education on one of the latest, one of the new descriptors introduced by the Companion Volume, which is online interaction. So we just published a volume in Italian, sorry, but we're going to translate it in the future, collecting the experimentation that we had with schools, with a sample of schools in Italy on online interaction. And always linked to online interaction, we launched a survey in cooperation with the Council of Europe, in particular with Erika Piccard and Ryan Nort, among the authors of the Companion Volume of the Common European Framework. And we launched a questionnaire survey on online interaction, because we wanted to further investigate this scripture, in particular during the spirit of distance learning and teaching during the emergency for COVID-19. And we are going to publish the results of the survey soon. Then we we've been running two pilot projects linked, always linked to the European Commission policies on languages, in particular, the Council of Recommendation 2019. We are experimenting, we are conducting two projects on two best practices, two examples of best practices that are mentioned by European Commission in the Council of Recommendation. One is the Fural Literacy Teaching for Deeper Learning, which is a project promoted by DCML, the European Center for Modern Languages. And I'm the privilege to be involved as a member of the consultancy team in Graz. And the other one is Artificial Linguistic Diet, in cooperation with UCL London, with Dina Memtin, in particular. And these are two very interesting practice models that focus on language diversity, on pluralism, on the announcement of home languages, and on CLIL. And we are starting from this, this project is models that, of course, we've been investigating, we've been also through studied visits in different European schools. We are now experimenting these models on the same pool of schools in Italy. Then the main focus on today's presentation is the Survey on Languages. The survey on languages that we launched at European, at international level, thanks to the support of School Education and Gateway as well, of the European Commission. We designed this survey in cooperation with the European Commission, in particular with Christina Cunningham, that I would like to thank, in particular. And so it was launched in in June. And then just in August, we closed it. So we are still analyzing the data. And we are going to publish reports in cooperation with the European Commission. So this is just some highlights. We are going to tell you just some of the main results that we are going to further analyze. So first of all, thanks to all the teachers that answered the field in our survey. We had a lot of Italian teachers, but of course, it was launched at international level. So we had respondents from many countries. So thank you, thank you very much. So just a few words about the profile of the respondents. We had a 6,000, about 6,000 respondents, but then only about 3,000 complete answers. It was quite long. So apologies that there were quite different topics of interest. The teachers were mainly foreign language teachers, but also foreign language and clear teachers, because the questionnaire was addressed to both language and clear teachers. And they were mainly teaching at upper secondary level, but also lower secondary education. And then as you can see, primary education and pre-primary also some teachers. Then talk about the home languages. So one of the topics, one of the areas that we wanted to investigate was just the provisions for supporting students' home languages, in case these were not generally included as foreign languages in the curriculum. So as you can see here, unfortunately, only 11% answered yes. So this is, well, then we have 47% no, and then I'm sorry, 40% I don't know, and then no. So it's quite a critical, we can say critical figure. And of course, it's an issue that should be further developed. And that's why, as I was saying, in Italy, we are working in this field with specific research projects. Then Clare, Clare was one of the areas that we wanted to further investigate, because as you probably know, Clare in Italy has been compulsory since 2010, in upper secondary education. And so the time Minister of Education has been investing a lot in Clare, but of course, we know that is quite popular all over Europe and beyond. So we have 50%, 50% of the participants with experience with Clare experience. And we also wanted to know a little bit more about the Clare teacher profile. In Italy, for example, the Clare teacher is the DNL, the subject teacher, with specific, of course, skills, specific training in both in language and in the methodology in the clear methodology. And so we have here a balance situation between subject teacher and both language teacher and subject teacher as the typical Clare teacher profile. And then also talking about Clare, the average is one language taught in according to the Clare methodology, and especially in upper secondary school. So as I was saying, in Italy, it's compulsory, but also we have a lot of examples also from lower secondary and primary secondary primary school. Then another area that we wanted to investigate was the flexibility of the curriculum. So of course, always referring to languages. Well, the findings here are quite in showing some sort of rigidity, we can say of the curriculum and not so flexible. For example, we have, we have some questions about the first foreign language that could be dropped in exchange against against any against another language, or against another non language subject. And we have here, as you can see, no is 78% and 84% is no. So it's quite rigid. While the second foreign language to be dropped in exchange against another language. So here the situation we have a yes with the 36%. So a little bit more flexible in terms of, you know, a second language with another language. So a little bit of more flexibility in exchanging different foreign languages. And then another area that we wanted always linked of course to language provision, specific school pathways on languages that could be, for example, extra curriculum pathways that may happen in Italy, for example. So additional hours, maybe in the afternoon or, you know, after after school. And here the, as you can see from the graph, we have 51%. Yes. So specific pathways focused on language providing up a secondary school. So it's quite, you know, a good, good, good finding from some of this graph. And also very positive is that three languages are taught in this pathway. So it's quite, you know, diverse, quite wide range of language provisions in this specific pathways on languages. And then, as I said, we launched the survey during the emergency. And of course, we wanted to investigate the situation about language teaching remotely. And we found out that 97%. So almost all teachers have been teaching remotely during this period. For example, in Italy, after a certain term, it was compulsory. There were specific, you know, decrease by the Ministry of Education. And so it was made compulsory. We wanted to to ask teachers the main challenges in remote teaching. As you can see, oral interaction turned out to be quite challenging 61%. Of course, oral interaction, as we know, is quite complicated to be fostered to be developed through, you know, through technologies, especially peer interaction, interaction with peers and also, you know, cooperative group, but even if we know that there were so many good examples of activities in breakout rooms and other, you know, other ways, other tools that teachers use to foster oral interaction. But of course, as a general idea, it turned out to be quite challenging. While the language skills that they found easy to develop and reading, to develop a remote teaching reading, of course, reading is quite easy and also internet offers a lot of, you know, input and a lot of audio books and other ways to foster reading. But as there were overall experience from the teachers answers, we can say that the students' reactions to remote teaching was quite good, quite, they were quite satisfied, 36%. And, and also teachers said that they could rate their progress. They made some quite good progress, despite the challenges, despite the problems that that they had. Then another area that we wanted to investigate was the, the teacher's idea, the teacher's opinion about possible European language test on languages, European test on languages. Of course, thinking about PISA 2025, because we are, we've been involved in the, also in the framework of the test that's going to be launched in 2025. As you can see, the idea, the opinion of the teachers is quite, quite good, they are quite in favor of, you know, a test, a language test. And so 87% said yes. And about the skills that they would like to be tested, we have listening and oral interaction, which is quite surprising. Because our interaction is quite difficult to be tested. As we said, it turned out to be a challenge for, you know, remote teaching and learning. And in, you know, a standardized test or interaction is quite, you know, a big challenge. But that's what our teachers answered. And so of course, these are just provisional data that we are going to further develop and publish in, in other words, also in cooperation with the European Commission. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you so much. It was very, very insightful. Thanks a lot. And so I would just to remind to our audience that if they have any questions to the DC, please don't hesitate to type it in the chat and we will come back to it in the end of the webinar. And we'll go straight to our second speaker, John. John, could you unmute your microphone and your presentation is uploaded? Hi, hello. I hope you can hear me. So in the presentation that I'm going to give today, I'll try to focus on some aspects of, of the treatment of minority languages in a place in which bilingualism is a reality as in the past country. We've been bilingual for, for centuries. And nowadays with the inclusion of, of curricularly the third language, English in our case in the, in most of the schools in the past country, we have to deal with this reality of being trilingual or at least trying to, trying to be. And it's not been an, an easy thing in the last years, but we've found a little way, thanks to, to scientifically grounded things that, that we've found in, in, in research. And nowadays we are implementing a small but progressively big changes in, in the system that we hope that can, can help others as, as you, as the teachers that are attending this, this webinar to find your own way, always with, with the support of, of scientific evidence. I'm trying to move this, sorry if I'm not able. Okay. So what's the case in the past country? We, we have the mix of a second minority and foreign languages. As you know, we have Spanish as, as the main language in Spain, but then there are some other co-official languages in some specific regions, as, as it is the case of the past country where Basque is the language that, that some of us use at home. And also it is a language that is being taught at school. And in, in the previous presentation, we've seen that there's a clear focus on how language is being mastered. So which is the knowledge we have of the language, which is the proficiency levels that, that we are quite in a given language. But in, in our situation, it's more about the use and the specific context in which the languages are used, because we have had some serious issues with language management. So we've reached, as you will see soon, very high levels of, of competency in the two languages, but still the use is not as proportionate as it is the knowledge. So for, for those of you who don't know the past country is in the north of Spain. It is a bilingual society where these two languages are, are spoken. But Basque is clearly a minority language. It's a regional language as compared to Spanish, which is all over the place in Spain. And what do the numbers say about the, the use of Basque nowadays? Well, we have roughly 44, 45% of Spanish monolinguals, that is people who only speak in Spanish. And then we have roughly 40% of active bilinguals. So these are people who are able to communicate and actually do communicate in the two languages. Plus a 15% of passive bilinguals, who are people who know Basque and Spanish, even though they actively communicate mainly in Spanish, not in Basque. So that's what, what the numbers say at the moment, we are talking about more than one million bilingual, active and bilingual, sorry, active and passive bilinguals. And this graph to me is the, the most enlightening one, as you see from the 91 to recently to 2016, the percentage of people who are active bilinguals, those are the reddish bars, have, have increased progressively in a kind of linear manner. So these are beautiful numbers. Thanks to the different linguistic policies that have been implemented in, in the Basque country, we've managed to reach a very high level of competence in the two languages. And that's good for all. But the other lines you see here, which are the, the purple and the yellowish lines, they are about the, the specific use or, or contextual implementation of, of multilingualism in, in one's home or with one's friends. The numbers have progressively increased, but as you can see from the 91 to very recently, the increase is not as big as the one in the knowledge. So in other words, we have more people who speak Basque, but we, the, the knowledge is not comparable to the use. So still people tend to use Spanish at specific circles or contexts like with a family or with friends. So the, this is, this conundrum that we have in which we see a disproportionate variance between the increasing knowledge and the not that big increase in the use. Our take is that maybe this has to do with how the school system is being set. And for this I'm going to give you an overview of, of how things have been in the, in the Basque school system. At the beginning, when, when Spain was under the dictatorship of, of Francisco Franco, other languages different from Spanish were not admitted in, in regular school. So that was essentially an exclusion for any language that was not Spanish. So of course, Basque was one of these cases and nobody could speak Basque at the school. Then more recently, when, when the dictatorship ended and we entered in a, in a democratic landscape, different models, linguistic models and educational models emerged. We call them A, B and B. Model B is B for bilingual and it's essentially based on integration of the two languages we see in the same context. So imagine a situation in which a kid goes to school and the two languages can be used. The only thing is that some of the subjects will be taught in one of the language and then some others will be taught in a different language. That's model B, which sounds very logical for a bilingual society like the Basque country. And then we have other models which are A and D. Model A is the Spanish only model. Basque is not completely excluded because you can find some hours per week for Basque, but everything is mainly taught in Spanish. That's the vehicular language. In contrast you can see the the opposite which is model B in which only Basque is the the core language or the vehicular language and you can find little hours dedicated to Spanish and of course to English as a foreign language. And these are the numbers regarding how many students or pupils you can find nowadays in each of the of the models. Starting from the 90s in which almost everyone was attending at least 65 percent of the students were attending Spanish only system. You can see that this number has dropped down to 18 percent at the moment and most of our students our kids are enrolled in a Basque only system. So that's the model D. The blue line is the the most paradigmatic to me because it tells us that from the 90s to nowadays so 30 years of having a bilingual school system we've not managed to put more students in model B which is the one that to the eyes of some of us would be the most representative for a bilingual population. I mean if we know the two languages and we kind of use the two languages at home or at the street why not having them also equally represented within the school. Well this is not the case. Most of the parents send their kids to the Basque only or mainly Basque only system. But what if instead of opting for for segregation or an integration model we we opt for an inclusion model. A model in which all the languages can be represented within the same school system without parceling out or without contextualizing, without creating big logic scenarios so that everyone can speak in any language anytime. What would this mean? What's the difference between integration and inclusion? Well integration per se is the act of putting something which is an out from the outside within the system still in a very compacted way and this means that they are part of the system but they are not interacting with the system so much. As you can see with with the cartoonist dots that I have created here, imagine a situation in which everything is green then you have some diversity which could be blue or yellow and you bring them in the system but still having them as a subgroup of the big group. That's mainly in integrating something but including something or promoting in educational inclusion means that every single color in this case call it language, call it person should interact with the others in a relatively free manner. They should be part of the system and it is now a different system so it's not about having one system with an addition but rather changing the system so that the system includes everything and all the agents are part as an equal part. This speaks for respect and response to diversity. It's not part of, it's not including this diversity as part of us but still looking at them from the generalistic perspective meaning treating them as a minority but rather responding to them in a very interactive manner in which we all change thanks to this diversity. Inclusive education is not something proper from linguistic diversity of course. We can be talking about physical functional diversity so people with different functional physical needs or people with different cognitive skills or abilities on psychological states that diversity should be also accounted for by the educational system of course and also socioeconomic diversity. All these responses in an inclusive manner should be promoted but of course in our case we are not talking about linguistic diversity. In order to be able to respond adequately to this situation we should be in a way breaking some rules that have been in the system for quite a long time now. Okay, something is going on with the presentation and tells us that I cannot present you something but it is very easy. What it was here was essentially the case of a bilingual school as I have told you before in which different languages have been integrated not included so an integrative point of view in which different subjects have a different language. Imagine a kid that comes to the school and the first subject that this person is taught is maths and mathematics is in Spanish. Then when the subject ends this kid will receive a different subject like geography and geography now is going to be taught in Basque for instance and then when this finishes then it comes history and history is taught again in Spanish as the first one but not as the former one. So we go from one language to the other and from a very general point of view we would be talking about the bilingual school because two languages have been represented at the end of the day but the problem we have is that this is not more than a sequence of monolingual facts. I mean every single class or every every single subject is creating a monolingual context and then when this monolingual context ends it comes a different monolingual context probably in a different language but this is not more than a sequence of monolingualisms. This is not a real bilingual school as we want to think of. And from the point of view of cognitive science we want to promote a fully inclusive linguistic model that thanks to the most recent evidence coming from cognitive science, psycholinguistics and psychology, cognitive psychology mainly we can fully endorse models that are based on an inclusive management of languages that allows students or kids to speak in the languages they know in a relatively free manner. But for this we need to forget about this one language one subject one language rule that I that I just mentioned that you couldn't see for the Adobe something reasons. So the one subject one language rule is that that has been there in the school system for years in which you can pitch one subject only in one language. But the real question behind this why? What's the evidence for this? And thanks thanks to the some years of studies that we've been developing not only us but also many of our colleagues now we know that science is not endorsing such an approach. That science is much more inclusive and open giving us the possibility to mix the languages without having any negative drawback of this. And the two critical points that I want to highlight here is that mixing languages within within the school or within the subject does not harm learning at all one and second that mixing sometimes it's much easier for the cognitive system. I am a cognitive neuroscientist I've been studying the human brain for quite a while and now I'm putting all this knowledge back to the educational system. And what we are seeing is that talking in different languages of course activates different brain areas and the the brain activity is and can be different but this does not imply that things are more difficult because we are using more than one language that this is not necessarily the case one thing is is a brain activity which of course is higher and different but then the behavioral result I mean how well we we learn things is not being impaired in any form by the mix of languages. I'm not going to to give you a full overview of the studies that we've done but imagine a situation this this was one of the first ones that we did in which kids and adults are presented with elements objects that that they didn't know about so as the one that you have on the screen this is a golden metal piece of something that actually when you see it you would say well no idea what it is maybe some of you know but to be fair I don't know what it is and then we give them the kids and the adults some definitions about this because this is what sometimes learning is about is is learning what new things are for what new things mean and and imagine that you have two languages language a and language b a is in blue b is in red in one of the big groups what we did was giving definitions in just one language language a which was the maturity language and then in some of the other groups we give them a part of the definition or one sentence of the definition in the maturity language language a but also some other part of the definition in language b which was in this case a minority language okay result after doing plenty of analysis including brain recordings what we saw is that learning was identical in the two conditions it doesn't really matter what whether you learn things mixing majority and minority languages or whether you did it only in the majority language knowing that sometimes speaking my minority minority minority language sorry is not a busy so despite the difficulty of accessing the minority language sometimes our participants sold equal amount of learning and and they actually did it equally well so that's the first part of the evidence and the second one which i'm going to present in a very schematic way it's it's about how we speak and which are the processes behind our language switching abilities and language mixing abilities imagine a very basic scenario in which a person is spanish basque bilingual and that person can name things in in both languages so you see a picture of a dog and you would say in spanish perro and in basque you would say cacur for the book you would go libro and in basque it would be liburu so in principle you could be able to speak so this person could be able to speak in the two languages even if say this person has some proficiency differences let's say that this person has a higher competence of spanish than of basque there's a very very well studied phenomenon which is the language switching cost phenomenon that tells us that if i ask you to name something in one language and the next thing to be named i ask you to name it in a different language there is a cost as compared to a condition in which the two things are named in the same language okay so this is the switching cost effect that has been out there for years and years now and that we know pretty well even which are the neurobiological markers of it so whenever we need to switch because someone tells us that we need to do it it takes us a while and this while can be measured in milliseconds and in cognitive cost but what if we leave participants beside the language in which they want to to name the things what if we don't give them the Q what if we simply let them speak either in basque or spanish in this case and by the way this has been also replicated in in spanish and english and in other language combinations in other other places of the world so what what happens there well there are two big facts that happen and that are highly surprising the first one is that people our kids our adults even if they are not that proficient in in the second language or the minority language or the foreign language they decide to switch because both things are active and they simply have to pick the word they want in any language and throw it because they are allowed to do so okay so the first thing is that they do switch a lot voluntarily spontaneously and that's that's beautiful because nobody asked them to do so and the second thing that was amazing is that if you compute the time and cognitive effort involved in naming something only in one language versus naming elements so speaking in any language as you want it is much easier it goes much faster when you are free to use the languages than when you need to inhibit one language and speak only in the other that means if you give me the chance to switch languages freely first I will switch and second this is less costlier for my brain as compared to a situation in which only one language is allowed even if this language is the well-known language so the maturity language so mixing is much easier for the cognitive system and this brings us to the to the final part sorry for the color something happened to the presentation but what about trans language in trans language in this is this beautiful pedagogical tool system that we are progressively implementing and using in which all the known languages at the school can be easily and freely used so we have a person let's consider this person a kid that comes to us as teachers and he speaks to us in in one of the languages that he and we know why not responding in a different language if that other language is also known by the kid so that's trans language in which you as a teacher or as a language manager do use strategically the languages depending on the educational needs and the moments but you leave the other source speaking the link in all the languages depending on their needs and the moment so that's it's an essentially very inclusive manner of using the languages all of them can be represented and then when you measure they are actually represented in the classroom and it is a very very respectful treatment of linguistic diversity including majority languages minority languages and also the foreign languages that are taught at the school so that's why you can also include new languages this way and with the correct training from the point of view of the teachers and the school managers this can yield huge benefits for the educational system I'm very sorry but again something happened here and I can I cannot see what it was here but what I remember that I have here was a final note on how to promote this so the first thing that we need is a correct teacher back to the power point if you want to if you would want to see the never mind because okay this was this was the last slide to be first don't worry yeah no I I was presenting here which are the basic things that we need to keep in mind for the correct implementation of an inclusive linguistic model an inclusive inclusive linguistic model is not created from one day to another you need to work on this at the teacher training level so you need to devote time for these at the at the university you need to devote time for this at the at the big policy level and you need to train teachers correctly so this has to be done in a progressive manner in which teachers are taught by experts on how to do this and how to use these techniques or adopt these these systems but also these these requires some national local and autonomic policies so we need the politicians to do their job also and adopt some policies that promote inclusive linguistic management of the languages at the school so if you in your school decide to go this way then if you have the favor of the of your managers that's that's perfect but the only way to have something much more meaningful out of this is by by including or by asking our governors our politicians to adopt national level policies and then to include clean with mixing languages within the school system it was beautiful to see from the previous presentation that Italy already adopted this this line but sadly I should say that not all the the country somewhere off have done this and this is not the case in in Spain not even in the bus country so that was it and I'm very sorry that you missed some of the beautiful slides but thank you so much it was my pleasure thank you so much John it was really really great presentation it was very interesting to learn more about this language dynamic in bus country and I apologize for this technical issue with some slides so we will move directly to the next speaker Sabrina Rossum Sabrina can you hear me I'm here can you hear me yes I can hear you perfectly thank you very much for having me here first of all and for giving us I mean to the MPLD and also to the members of this ECAP project to be part of this webinar we will focus again on regional languages lesser used languages minority languages as you want to to name them so this project brings young people and teachers from different language regions together by looking the way language minority or less used languages is handled in another country we also find out more about what you you feel and think about your own language and we start from this point of view and we ask our side we wonder why do young people in Udine in Italy and in Fassavalli in Italy still speak a minority language in their schoolyards for example instead of just Italian and what is that that makes for example Catalan students and Hungarian young students of Romania proud of their language and this is the point of view we start from in order to present you this project so I'm trying to okay and we started asking our students do we want do you want to cross your region borders with your language with your minority or lesser use language and yes the project the project bases on the classroom activities of the European Charter for regional or minority languages published by the Council of Europe in February 2019 this tool is considered to be fundamental in order to present and spread the contents of the European Charter for regional and minority languages at a popular level among common people and in schools for example intending to make all minority communities aware of their rights the status of their language and the possibility offered by the Charter itself so schools are indeed the primary institution where constitutional regional and minority languages are thought we hope in the majority of of our regions and they are used at family level but not always and so we would like students to look at their regional languages from a meta-linguistic point of view and to develop their ability to understand the importance of speaking a regional and minority language together with majority languages so we decided to work at school level involving schools and students between 13 and 18 years of five different EU regions in order to reach the following concrete results and you can see the results resumed here so use and implement part of the European Charter classroom activities of the European Charter for regional and minority languages published by the Council of Europe use them in school create new possible original didactic tools and new activities to spread the contents of the European Charter for regional and minority languages and we aimed also at creating a first laboratory of schools working on the European Charter and its contents and in particular on minority languages thus creating a kind of proactive network of schools involved where the knowledge of the European Charter should become a fundamental still of students and of teachers of course in order for them to know what their rights are and in doing these we involved also some universities of regional of regions so where minority languages are spoken because we aimed at creating a kind of pilot activities to be proposed at university courses for students in teacher education in law and in political science because we wanted to somehow train teachers who will teach the minority original languages so we started from the point of view that we needed the classroom activities of the Council of Europe to be translated in the regional languages involved in the project then we presented this project in some secondary schools trying to involve as many teachers and classes as possible and in last November 2019 we had the kickoff meeting in Brussels where teachers were let's say involved in order for them to have the possibility to program together and to go on working together on this project because we wanted them to be the protagonist of the project you can see we created this kind of workshops where they could discuss the project and the content they wanted to develop then of course they started to work in classes and we also imagined and then developed we will see later how meetings among students exchange experiences about the subject of minority languages and about this issue and giving them the possibility to use the minority language together with the majority language in this case English in order to to be able to communicate the creation of the university models is an issue that is being discussed by the universities involved and we will see the universities involved and in particular by the University of Udine in Italy Friulian minority language and this will be a tool we would like to share with other universities in other regions speaking regional languages in order to develop them and to give the possibility to these teachers to be as said trained and a lot of activity of the project is the reporting of the phases of this project itself through articles that are published on the ECHA webpage I will present to you later and on the website the website of the MPLD network to promote linguistic diversity that is co-financing the project because all the minority communities involved in this project are members of the network to promote linguistic diversity I am representing here you can see this was one of of the pictures of this meeting where students could sorry teachers could work together so in this project we have seven partners and five languages minority languages involved we have Ledin Friulian Magir in Romania and Catalan so Ledin in Italy Friulian in the province of Friulian of course then we have the regional agency for Friulian language and the University of Fudine I have already talked about it for Friulian the Partium Christian University for the Magir community in Romania and Church of Ives Universitas for Catalan these partners were asked to involve as many schools and as many teachers and students as possible in the project you can see here the schools we have in fact 15 schools involved with about 500 students and the number of students depends in each depends on the on the number of speakers in regions of course and on the availability of the teachers in participating in the in the project being available to collaborate and to work with us all the activities were are present in a web page we created for the ECA project and we guess it is the unique page on the web presented in five lesser used languages plus English and we are somehow proud of this because in fact minority languages here are protagonists and you can see all the results and I invite you to enter the the link and to see some of the results of the project because in fact it is a work in progress yes okay let's see now the activities at school so each school has organized and is still organizing the activities on the topic of language diversity in its own way according to the sensibility of the teachers involved because as already said we are convinced that it is fundamental to involve teacher and to encourage them to be protagonist in the issue of minority languages because sometimes they feel not to be ready to present something in their own language minority language because they feel they they don't know enough about it but they are the first protagonists and we are working with them in order to create these didactic unions so teachers as you can see use the different approaches to the topic for example united in diversity as you know the slogan and they started from here in italian for example they considered all minority the minority languages in italy recognized by the by the the start at the national law and they started to discuss about these then teacher sorry students were also asked to somehow think about their feelings towards the language who are you what's your language what's your what's your identity of course here you have the translation in english but they worked on these in their minority languages of course or they use for example memory in order to to to to inquire somehow the contents of the european chapter for regional minority languages or to be more active in somehow understanding the meaning of being part of this minority community that works and leaves together with majority languages so and we had a lot of activities and other are being developed now so you can see and we also asked students to approach the language from an emotional point of view in order to encourage them to come out with something very original and that is near their hearts and their families and they experience in language because we are convinced that only in this way we can promote the use of the minority language because it's your roots in fact so other projects you can see here the the catalan students some of the catalan students working on the on minority languages and working on their own language but the core of this project is a video contest this video contest aimed at selecting some students who could participate in the exchange program we had programmed for this for this spring but because of the COVID it couldn't be developed and it will be repeated let's say or proposed again next year but in order to do these we encourage the students to create videos in their own languages with subtitles in English with the the question what does your language mean for you now and in the future I selected one of these videos I can't show the video to you now but I think you will have the possibility to enter the web page and go through the videos and understand the the participation of the students in their language and I chose some some sentences of a video of a Magia girl of Romania who is somehow expressing what her language means for her so to me it means red white and even green the Hungarian flag of course it means the goulash soup the kidney cake the spring the shepherd with star eyes but sometimes it means yelling escaping the pain that burns our throat because we feel ashamed of our mother tongue but I'm still here I am here because it means pride freedom and fatherland I think I it's not necessary to add other other words because this really expresses the feelings that these students have towards their language and you will find a lot of videos like like these so we as as I told you we couldn't have this student program exchange is springer of this year and we will repeat it in 2021 we will ask students to use their language and to participate in the in the meetings in their languages because the point is that they should understand the the way of life of other communities because through this video they got the possibility to live in a family where another regional language is spoken so they will feel somehow connected with this family even if the the language the minority language is not in the same we will encourage them to work together to make videos and you will see the the work in progress on our website or on our web page sorry so the COVID the COVID didn't sorry prevent us to propose alternative activities in order to keep students tuned on the project and in particular on the exchange program we ask them to make videos again to speak their language to share this on Instagram on our YouTube channel and we also as you can see in these in these pictures we also created this COVID mask with the the drawings of a very famous Italian artist who is renowned in Italy thanks to his and drawings you can see and here you you can see that the these posters explaining the the measures against COVID have been translated in different languages and have been translated also in the minority language there is a website of this this artist where you can find a lot of languages translated where the the the the value of language is there also in the moment of the of the of the COVID and we think this can really help us to involve these students in in their activities also on the minority language and to try to make them understand that it's something that makes them reach and not poor because they have something let's say more an experience inside themselves they they themselves sorry they can somehow somehow express in this project so the conclusions so GACA project gives means to students to cross the borders in Europe with their regional language this rises their proudness to be part of a minority language community and to speak the language GACA project gives value to the teaching of and in regional language at school the activities of the GACA project puts the regional language near to English and other majority languages used to be able to interact with the partner students anyway the emotional interaction and the sharing of identity and cultural contents makes students feel connected also through their own regional language because they could meet themselves thanks to it the project is relevant at EU level we think because it is using and implementing a tool that has been created by the Council of Europe to support minority language communities of course developing the project we have also in mind a recent Council recommendation dated May 2019 on the comprehensive approach to the teaching and learning of languages thus proposing a concrete possible approach to constitutional regional and minority languages at school the project of course is open and can be reiterated so we invite interested schools to connect with us if they would like to join because we are sure that connected these students and giving them the possibility to meet thanks to their minority language they will find this let's say greed and they will see that their minority language is are the same have the the same value as the majority languages they are studying at school so I think that's all thank you very much thanks a lot Sabrina for introducing our audience to this project it was really great I believe it's a very nice initiative thank you once again and thanks to our old speakers for contributing to this webinar and now we have a chance to address some questions so we'll give it a couple of minutes to type your questions in the chat so please go ahead and in the meantime I could see that there were some questions already addressed during the presentation so one question is addressed to the TPM the question is how was oral interaction so developed during remote teaching and what method have been used is this for me? sorry I think it's for me right the question yeah okay thank you yeah so well for the matter that we used we designed the questionnaire with our colleague and with Christina Cunningham I see she is here so I would like to say hello and thank you because we divided the design did the questionnaire together and then of course we we had a sample of teachers to try it out before lunchtime and now we are analyzing the data of course it's quantitative mainly but also the some open questions and of course in that time to share with you all the results there was just some some highlights and then we are now going to analyze all this data all this open you know the comments from the teachers that are really interesting according to the framework analysis theory and then we're going to publish for the report and of course we're going to share with the European Commission with the CML so I say the opportunity I take the opportunity to say hello to Sarah Bradley and I mentioned the CML at the beginning because we are experimenting this project PTL which is a project promoted by the CML in Italy as well so we're going to to of course share all the the final reports and with with the work sent to the community and the teachers interested in that and for the second question about your interaction there are some interesting comments open comments in the questionnaire but also we've been collecting experiences in Italy in particular because we've been at Indira we've been supporting teachers in remote teaching and learning with a lot of initiatives a lot of webinars and so we had the opportunity to collect all the experiences during this period of course as it came out from the questionnaire our interaction turned out to be challenging to be fostered in remote teaching the teachers used a lot of European projects like it's raining around most so in this way students could get in touch with the with other peers from other countries and the opportunity to be engaged in the meaningful you know a task meaningful our interaction with the you know to share projects to share ideas and so on then they also teachers used of course online you know tools and like so webinars like Zoom or other or Zoom turned out to be one of the most popular and in particular the breakout rooms so they they organized separate rooms so that they could so that students could interact in you know in small groups maybe without the teachers control so in in order to foster you know fluency and to be so that it could be it could be free to to chat maybe also informally and then maybe reports you know discussions in in in plenary and also another very interesting strategy that was used during this remote teaching period was debate debate is one of my research areas about the teaching methodology is that we are we are investigating and in my institute and so debate in writing and debate or debate in you know in through the different conference different webinars was one of the easiest way to organize you know meaningful tasks so that students could you know have their their opinions to share and to defend and supporting evidence and so on but of course it was a challenge for our teachers thank you I did yeah and we have another question for Sabrina Sabrina one of our guests wondering is there the project open to new partners and schools so it is it is open this is a pilot project and as I as I said what we aim at is to involve as many schools as possible in order to give students the the possibility to share their to share their experiences and to go on working and to feel that they are not alone in Europe that we are a lot speaking lesser used languages so of course if they want to join they can write perhaps you can share the the contacts I think or they can search for the page the web page MPLD network to promote linguistic diversity and ask for these or write on my address on my mail address we can share it if you want I wrote it on my presentation thank you Sabrina indeed we will share the presentation on the webinar page within two days from now on so our guests will be able to access this information it's no problem thank you and for one more question for John John there was a wonder the question about do you think that local dialects could be considered in a multilingualism path hi well absolutely yes the I'll give you as an example what has happened in the BASC public television and radio system up until now we we have like a unified so to say dialect which is the one that that is mainly taught in different schools and then different other dialects of BASC up until now it has been this unified BASC has been the the one promoted by the public system in the TV and in the radio stations but nowadays we have realized that all the different dialects should be also incorporated because those are part of the richness of a language and of the society so now as you put the the BASC TV or radio station and you'll see or hear people speaking in the different dialects so that that's part of the of the richness of a country of course when we talk about the school it does apply at the macro level but at the micro level it's kind of difficult to expect a person to change from one dialect to another because typically one attaches to to a single dialect but it would be very rich for for a school to have all the little dialects representative as the different languages should be also representative there perfect thanks a lot John so I believe that there are not not there are no no more questions for the time being so I would throw this so this webinar to the end then so yeah I could see that there was quite a strong interest in the topic and also very positive feedback in our audience which is great and I think our speakers for this fruitful contribution to this webinar as well as our audience today for participation so that's it thanks a lot for joining us today one more time have a wonderful evening and goodbye