Seminars

The initial seminar of the BILIUM Project was organised and presented by Project Coordinator Dr. Ekaterina Kudrjavceva-Hentschel of the Foreign Languages and Media Centre at the University of Greifswald, and was held on the 25th and 26th August 2012. Partners from participating countries, including Germany, the UK, Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland were welcomed, and details of the project and future working arrangements were presented and discussed.

The aims and objectives of the project are to expand multilingual education in Europe by drawing on the skills brought by immigrant professionals, and to develop a programme of further training for teachers or staff in nurseries and primary schools working with children growing up in a multilingual environment. This will be done over several stages, the first of which will be to analyse the current situation in the partner countries concerning multilingualism with regard to legislature, the media and to courses and research work being carried out on multilingualism at schools, universities and other institutions. The second stage will involve practical work, in which teachers’ qualifications and weaknesses are analysed. The actual programmes for further staff training will be devised on the basis of the knowledge and skills acquired from all of the above and will be submitted to partner organisations for approval.

In addition to discussing plans for completing the first of these stages, useful and informative presentations on relevant subjects were given by professional and academic staff, including Prof. Dr. A. Wöll: “Presentation of the University of Greifswald Slavistics Project “Polish as a range of language acquisition from nursery school to A-level”, and Natali Topaj: Presentation of the ZAS Berlin Project on Research into Multilingualism.

Interesting and enjoyable excursions were arranged to both Greifswald and nearby Stralsund.