Background
Children are currently growing up in a world that is more diverse and connected than ever before.
However, research has shown that multilingual children often face unequal educational opportunities compared to their monolingual peers, which in turn leads to an achievement gap between monolingual and multilingual children.
To prevent this achievement gap from materialising, it is necessary to tackle the issue at its source, and to provide multilingual children with fruitful opportunities to develop important linguistic skills in all their languages.
In order to do this, Read with MEE focusses on the literacy development of young children belonging to national, regional, migrant, and refugee minorities, and will address their full linguistic repertoire.
The objectives of the project are:
- Increasing knowledge and strengthening skills
related to inclusive and multilingual early literacy and linguistic diversity. - Promoting interactive and engaging book reading
in a number of multilingual contexts, such as early childhood education and care (ECEC) centres, libraries, and children’s home environments. This holistic approach aims to take advantage of children’s multilingual environments, and will allow them to develop positive attitudes towards linguistic diversity and home languages along the way. - Working closely with experts and professionals from the field
to ensure that our products are based on the latest findings from multilingual and early literacy research, and to make sure that the products align with concrete needs from practitioners.
The main outputs of the project will be:
- The Handbook-INC: Multiliteracy Development for All which will provide people access to best practices and recent developments in literacy, linguistic diversity, and multilingualism research.
- A series of videos showing best practices across Europe and video interviews with experts from the field explaining key concepts related to multilingual literacy.
- An online library with inclusive multilingual books and useful links to relevant projects, publications, and experts.
- A serious app-based game with a multilingual story for adults and children to read together. The app will allow people to easily apply the knowledge and skills at the core of the project.
