EYLBID (Empowering Young Language Brokers for Inclusion in Diversity)

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 places special emphasis on creating awareness of the existence of the young interpreters’ phenomenon across Europe. EYLBID will contribute to the visibility of the phenomenon and will empower 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 will contribute to the respect for linguistic diversity and cultural richness and will foster a flexible attitude towards cultural diversity and traditions. EYLBID will develop materials which will contribute to foster linguistic, social and intercultural competences. Furthermore, the materials will be 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 will adopt multicultural, multiformat and multimodal approaches generating contents in the official languages of the participating countries: Spanish and Catalan, Italian, English and German. In addition, the created materials will include activities with the young students’ mother tongues, such as Chinese, Arabic, Turkish, Urdu, etc. All this will only be possible thanks to a combination of complementary partners who have a long tradition of working in the immigration, educational and linguistic fields of expertise. Partner’s backgrounds will secure a realistic development of the project.