Coordinator: Klaus-Börge Boeckmann (University of Vienna, Austria)

Team members: Eija Aalto (University of Jyväskylä, Finland), Andrea Abel (Accademia Europea di Bolzano, Italy), Terry Lamb (University of Sheffield, UK).

This project is unusual as an ECML project in that it explicitly does not deal with foreign or second languages. Our working term ‘majority language’, used in the project title, denotes a language variously referred to as a ‘national’ or ‘official’ language, a ‘language of instruction’ or a ‘language of education’ in Beacco & Byram's 2007 report (http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/guide_niveau3_EN.asp), but that has recently been termed a ‘language(s) of schooling’ in the 2009 project of that name by the Council of Europe's Language Policy Division (www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Schoollang_EN.asp). Such a language is usually the native language of a majority of pupils in a country, but not necessarily in an individual class or school, where many other native languages might be represented.

We are focusing on classrooms where the majority language is taught as a school subject, such as Swedish in Sweden, German in Austria or English in Ireland. Teachers of this subject have generally been trained for monolingual mother tongue teaching and are challenged by the increasingly diverse linguistic backgrounds of their students. On the one hand, they have to provide many pupils from other language backgrounds with L2 support to help them develop sound skills in the language of instruction for other subjects, and enable them to make use of this language as a learning tool. On the other hand, the majority language classroom has to respect linguistic diversity and must be integrated into a plurilingual education concept in which all subjects (language specific or not) contribute to the development of pupils’ plurilingual repertoires (see the Council of Europe's website, www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic).

The project examines majority language teachers’ strategies for dealing with these challenges and the ways school systems have found (such as school organisation, curriculum development or teacher training) to support them in a range of domains. MARILLE (http://marille.ecml.at) concentrates on secondary schools, taking existing material for the primary level into account. The project has taken what could be termed a bottom-up approach, relying to a large degree on contributions from the project participants in the ECML member countries to generate results in four main areas:

• • As a first step, we have identified professional networks which deal with (plurilingual) majority language teaching in a national or regional context. Networks can be a first contact point for teachers looking for help and they can also be asked to disseminate MARILLE's results.

• • We have also collected a significant number of resources which might be relevant for plurilingual majority language teaching and are presenting them on our website, grouped under the headings ‘Resources for teaching’, ‘Academic references’, ‘Websites’ and ‘Other resources’. They can support teachers looking for inspiration – some are ready-to-use classroom activities – and offer the potential of transfer to other contexts.

• • As we want to be as explicit as possible as to what a plurilingual majority classroom looks like, we are presenting a number of practice examples (deliberately not called ‘good’ or ‘best’) suggested by participants from various countries. These examples include classroom videos, teaching materials and classroom activities, each supplemented with a template providing information about the context in which they were developed and their specific aims within the general objective of fostering plurilingual education in the majority language classroom.

• • The fourth area draws the ideas behind the resources and practice examples together in a set of principles or strategies to manage change towards plurilingualism in the majority language classroom for agents at all levels of the school system, with the main objective of empowering teachers to deal constructively with the new challenges. An important aim is to show that the ‘traditional’ contents of majority language curricula such as ‘analysing language’ or ‘developing literacy skills’ can be targeted just as well with a plurilingual approach as with traditional monolingual approaches.

In the next phase of our project – although there will be continuous development in all project areas – the main focus will be on the formation of these principles, with the help of project participants from various countries. The principles can serve as guidelines for teachers, teacher educators, school administrators and other agents in the school system.