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The Council of Europe's European Centre for Modern Languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2011

Waldemar Martyniuk
Waldemar Martyniuk*
Affiliation:
European Centre for Modern Languages, Graz, Austriawaldemar.martyniuk@ecml.at
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Extract

The European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML), a Council of Europe Partial Agreement based in Graz, Austria, has been serving the community of language education professionals in its 34 member states for over 15 years now. This unique intergovernmental centre, integrated within the Council of Europe's Department of Language Education and Policy, offers concrete approaches to the issues and challenges facing Europe's multicultural societies in a period of intensive change and mobility.

Information

Type
Research in Progress
Information
Language Teaching , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 398 - 399
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

The European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML), a Council of Europe Partial Agreement based in Graz, Austria, has been serving the community of language education professionals in its 34 member states for over 15 years now. This unique intergovernmental centre, integrated within the Council of Europe's Department of Language Education and PolicyFootnote 1, offers concrete approaches to the issues and challenges facing Europe's multicultural societies in a period of intensive change and mobility.

The Centre has successfully completed two large-scale medium-term programmes of activities, comprising more than 50 projects, coordinated by international teams of experts and directly involving over six thousand language professionals in Europe and beyond, with the impact reaching as far afield as Canada and Japan. Empowering language professionals is the overall objective of the current, third, programme of ECML activities, to be concluded in 2011. At present (November 2010), 23 international project teams established by the Centre are finalising their work on developing practical approaches and tools for language education.

The Centre's projects are organised within four-year programmes. The second medium-term programme (2004–07) grouped 22 projects under the title ‘Languages for social cohesion – language education in a multilingual and multicultural Europe’.

The Centre's third medium-term programme (2008–11) entitled Empowering language professionals: Competences – Networks – Impact – Quality encompasses 23 different projects and addresses the following four thematic areas:

  1. A. Evaluation and assessment

  2. B. Continuity in language learning

  3. C. Content and language integrated education

  4. D. Plurilingual educationFootnote 2

In 2008, the programme content and concept, together with four projects selected from the programme, were presented to the readers of Language Teaching by Susanna Slivensky, the Head of Programmes at ECML, and the project coordinatorsFootnote 3. Four more projects from this programme are presented in more detail below. The programme will come to a conclusion in September 2011 with a large-scale international conference in Graz, at which the outcomes of the programme will be presented and disseminated to a wide professional public in Europe.

References

1 Within the Directorate General for Education, Culture and Heritage, Youth and Sport (DG IV), this department includes the secretariats of the Language Policy Division, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in Strasbourg and the European Centre for Modern Languages.

2 For more information on the projects in the ECML's current medium-term programme see www.ecml.at/empowerment

3 Language Teaching 41.3: p. 435–443.