Regional case studies of multilingual education in (inter)regional settings

(WP8, 2006–2008)

Summary Results

State Language Teaching in Need of Modernization

The dominant need of linguistic minorities in South Tyrol (Italy), Vojvodina (Serbia), Transylvania (Romania) and Felvidék (Slovakia) is fulfilled: they get education in their mother tongue. However, another important need, the need to learn the state language, is not met (except in South Tyrol): both teaching methodologies and the lessons’ content are inadequate. This is what the LINEE case studies "(Inter) regional case studies of multilingual education" suggest.

Rationale

As the regional PISA study indicates, schoolchildren from areas with bi- or tri-lingual education systems also achieve above-average results in non-linguistic subjects. Often, far away from urban centres (such as in South Tyrol), these areas appear to have developed “best practices”, which benefit the general level of education. These practices and their historical roots, their natural linguistic contact situations and their language acquisition dimensions will be investigated, in order to answer questions regarding the setting up of successful teaching methods, and gauge their measurability.

Objectives

The objective is to analyse and to compare the school systems in South Tyrol with each other and define a catalogue of “best practices” that were developed to enable the students to cope with the biand trilingual daily life. This WP also aims to survey the state and characteristics of multilingual education of one of Europe’s largest and, certainly, Central Europe’s largest ethnic and linguistic minority population, namely, Hungarians living outside of Hungary. The objective is also to establish a “framework for multi-competence” based on the available information from the South-Tyrolean context and the situation of the Hungarian minorities.