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SIXTH
INTERNATIONAL METROPOLIS CONFERENCE WORKSHOP
16: Multilingual Cities Project Tuesday, November 27, 2001
14:00 - 15:30
ORGANIZERS Name: Guus Extra
Title: Professor of Language and Minorities
Affiliation: Babylon, Tilburg University
Mailing address: Postbus 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg
Courier address: Warandelaan 2, Tilburg
Telephone number: 013 - 466 26 68 (secr)
Fax number: 013 - 466 31 10
E-mail address: Guus.Extra@kub.nl
Name: Kutlay Yagmur
Title: Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics
Affiliation: Babylon, Tilburg University
Mailing address: Postbus 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg
Courier address: Warandelaan 2, Tilburg
Telephone number: 013 - 466 29 30
Fax number: 013 - 466 31 10
E-mail address: K.Yagmur@kub.nl WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION Under the auspices of the European
Cultural Foundation, established in Amsterdam, a cross-national project
is carried out on the status of immigrant minority languages at home and
at school in five large multicultural cities in Europe, i.e. in Brussels,
Hamburg, Lyon, Madrid and The Hague. The project is coordinated in cooperation
between the ECF and Babylon, Centre for Studies on Multilingualism in
the Multicultural Society, at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. At
the local level, cooperation takes place between universities, educational
authorities, and schools. The two major aims of the project are to gather
and compare survey data on home language use of elementary school children,
and to analyse and compare the educational status quo of immigrant minority
languages at both primary and secondary schools. The home language survey is
aimed at constructing language profiles and language vitality indices
of a variety of immigrant minority groups in terms of language repertoire,
language proficiency, language choice, language dominance, and language
preference. The educational part of the project focuses on a comparative
cross-national analysis of the following dimensions of immigrant minority
language instruction: target groups, arguments, objectives, evaluation,
enrolment (requirements), curricular status, funding, learning tools,
and teacher qualifications. The workshop has three major
aims:
1. to demonstrate the goals, research methods, and outcomes of the project;
2. to demonstrate how the procedures in this project can be utilized in
the context of other multicultural/multilingual cities and schools;
3. to demonstrate the relevance of the aims and outcomes of the project
for educational policy makers. A total of 134.366 students
(Brussels: 11.500, Hamburg: 45.766, Lyon: 11.500, Madrid: 24.000, and
The Hague: 41.600) took part in Multilingual Cities Project survey. Data
have been analysed among the dimensions reported above and in the workshop
major findings will be presented to show the distribution of immigrant
minority languages and the number of their speakers in the primary schools
of these five multilingual cities. Main objective of the workshop is raising
awareness of the existing multilingualism in multicultural European cities
and offering ways of dealing with it. STRUCTURE Part-1: Presentation of the
workshop (the aims of Multilingual Cities Poject, its relevance, etc.)
by Guus Extra (15inutes) Part-2: Reporting findings
on the distribution of languages and speakers in five cities by Kutlay
Yagmur (15 minutes) Part-3: Relating findings to
educational policy of respective cities (50 minutes: 10 minutes for each
city). Part-4:
Question-Answer session: relating the findings (10 minutes) DURATION
One session of 1,5 hours. |
