EYLBID (2020-2021) is a strategic partnership of 5 higher education institutions and one social enterprise. It focuses on one of the European horizontal priorities: social inclusion. Particularly, it focuses on linguistic and intercultural mediation and interpreting performed by teenagers.
Children and teenagers take an important role in migratory processes. Schooling and linguistic immersion in the new society help children learn the official language(s) of the new country faster than their parents might do. For this reason, these bilingual young people are the ones in their families who carry out the hard work of interpreting and translating to mediate communication between themselves and the outside world, between minority and majority communities.
EYLBID has placed special emphasis on creating awareness of the existence of the young interpreters’ phenomenon across Europe. EYLBID has contributed to the visibility of the phenomenon and has empowered young interpreters in their school contexts. On many occasions, children and youngster mother tongues which differ from the official ones are not given sufficient value and role in the school setting. The project has contributed to the respect for linguistic diversity and cultural richness and has fostered a flexible attitude towards cultural diversity and traditions.
EYLBID has developed materials which have contributed to foster linguistic, social and intercultural competences. Furthermore, the materials are open, following the open-access approach promoted by the EC (COM2007/56, C2012/4890). The open nature of the materials will contribute to tackle social division and allow for a wider inclusion. As said, the created resources will enhance the development of social and intercultural skills because the project has adopted multicultural, multiformat and multimodal approaches generating contents in the official languages of the participating countries: Spanish and Catalan, Italian, English and German.
All this has only been possible thanks to a combination of complementary partners who have a long tradition of working in the immigration, educational and linguistic fields of expertise.
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This project has been funded with support from the European Commission.
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