A Perfect Birthday Present

On time to its first birthday the Center for Multilingualism received a nice present: Its application for a transfer platform „Multilingualism in kindergartens and schools“ to the amount of 162.680 Euro was granted. The project was initiated by Tanja Rinker and Janet Grijzenhout and will be funded by the Excellence Initiative for two years. The goal is to increase and promote multilingualism in educational institutions. “We will collaborate with practitioners from kindergartens and schools. In the first year, a new multilingual lexical instrument (cross-linguistic lexical task) which was originally developed within an EU-network by me and Natalia Gagarina in 2014, will be used to assess multilingual children in Konstanz”, explains Tanja Rinker. “This lexical instrument will be further developed into a digital reading test for easy use in primary schools. The test can serve to e.g. assess the success of bilingual alphabetization in German and Italian. Secondly, together with the partners (schools and kindergartens in Konstanz as well as the Italian Consulate General in Stuttgart),  a one-year training on various aspects of multilingualism for school and daycare teachers will be developed, implemented, and evaluated.  It is planned to install this training as a regular offer in Konstanz.”