Considering the linguistic and cultural reality of a widened Europe, multilingual education at a pre-school age proves to be necessary. More than 50% of Europeans are either bilingual or live in an environment where they are confronted with 2 or more languages. Language acquisition and language enhancement get more and more important for an intercultural dialogue in our society and for increasing job chances of individuals. Multilingual language skills are important and, as children are especially receptive to learning languages at an early age, linguistic competences and a multilingual education should be implemented in Europe’s kindergartens. Educators in pre-school, and subsequently in school, however, often have difficulties providing the necessary educational assistance to bi-/multilingual children and their parents; especilaly children with a migration and ethnic background, who often have problems in both their first and second languages. They argue that, in order to provide these children with the best possible conditions for learning in school, the curriculum should include supportive material and that the fostering of language achuisition should start at the earliest possible age. Otherwise these children will start their school careers from a disadvantaged position and these unfavourable conditions will accompany them during their entire school life. This project mainly addresses educators in pre-school institutions, as well as bi-/multilingual children and their parents, as it aims to develop a methodology and instructional tools helping educators and parents to use web-based Open Education Resources (OER) for bilingual education in pre-school.  

More specifically, POLYGLOT will develop and implement:

• two reports, one on the State of the art on bi- and multilingual education in kindergartens and the other one on web-based OER (including free or very cheap Apps) for bilingual education
• a set of Guidelines on the use of web-based OER for bi-lingual education in kindergartens, and, based on this,
• two Guides and a two E-courses addressed respectively to educators and parents.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission.
This publication [communication] reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
[Project Number: 2014-1-AT01-KA201-000977]