Context
Cpia Avellino is the leading school of the DiM Project in collaboration with Cpia Benevento, Cpia Ravenna, Future Focus Ltd (Malta), Active Citizens Partnership (Greece), 36.6 Competence Centre (Scotland), IMS (Cyprus) All the schools and institutions involved in the project operate in the teaching of L2 to foreign students. Most of them are immigrants from African and Asian countries facing many problems such as low literacy or illiteracy. They often live in very disadvantaged economic and social conditions. Many are young people who have escaped from their villages of origin without any knowledge of the civil and social rules of the host country. Some speak only their own mother tongue which is often a dialect that only a few can understand, using a mixture of languages and dialects as a vehicular language. Many of them leave school before obtaining any certification.
DiM was born from the awareness that our foreign students are an inexhaustible source of linguistic and cultural wealth. They need innovative teaching methods and tools to encourage and motivate them, to make them feel part of the culture of the country in which they live and, at the same time, proud about their native culture.
Objectives
The project consists on a Multilingual Online Dictionary (DiM) elaborated and experimented by Lia Pensabene, a teacher from Cpia Avellino during school years 2016/17. The main idea behind the project is that our students, as native speakers, collaborate actively to the realization of the dictionary and promote the knowledge of their cultures trough their languages.
The main objectives of DiM are:
- to spread out a good practice related to making a multilingual dictionary;
- to support the process of teaching and learning a second foreign language;
- to improve student’s learning skills in second language;
- to encourage the active participation of students;
- to promote an intercultural dialogue between different cultures;
- to promote school, linguistic and social inclusion for a full integration of foreign immigrant students;
- to create a free and open multilingual online dictionary that will be the basis for further activities to be implemented later, such as, for example, a multicultural online library (intellectual output).
Target Groups
The target group to which our project is addressed are all foreign students and also the teachers of the various courses of the Cpias or of other schools or organizations that teach in L2 language courses or in other courses reserved for foreigners. Our intent is to extend our project to other institutions working in the field of adult immigrant education to increase the number of languages and dictionary users and to create a network for the exchange of information on linguistic and cultural data of the countries of origin of our students. This data will form later the basis for other products related to the dictionary, such as the creation of a multicultural library online.
Results expected
During the project we are expecting to collect and record at least one foreign language at Level 1 (according to the Common European Framework of References for Languages) from any partner trough linguistic workshop organized by each school or organization partner for their students.
The result we are expecting at the end of the project is the creation of a multilingual interactive dictionary accessible via a web platform on which all the languages collected can be visualized and used by students of all schools and organizations involved in the project or anyone else who want to use it for didactic or cultural purposes.
We also expected results in the field of:
intercultural education, peace and tolerance education. Our project will be realized in a multicultural and multilingual context with an international staff belonging to different countries within the European community. It will be a natural way to fight racism and xenophobia and build an intercultural dialogue.
Social inclusion. We believe that linguistic diversity and respect for all languages and cultures is fundamental to the process of constructing and maintaining dialogue and peace in the world and helps our students feel accepted by the society in which they intend to live. Improving and extending the supply of high quality learning opportunities tailored to the needs of individual low-skilled or low-qualified adults is one of the main objectives that Cpia Avellino and all our partners intend to achieve for our students who belong to different linguistic and cultural contexts. We can do it by creating a multilingual dictionary produced by the students and teachers in mutual respect of the culture that each one represents.
DiM Actvities
All the partners will be involved in the following activities:
- to collect and record at least one foreign language spoken by foreigner/immigrant students at Level 1 (about 343 words) through specific linguistic labs
- to write the words of the collected languages in a specific database
- to produce a sociolinguistic profile of the collected language by involving students
- to describe the alphabet of the language and its characteristics
- to produce a profile of the student to whom the collected language belongs
- to elaborate the languages data following a specific format which will be expanded and designed.