WRITTEN QUESTION E-0581/01

by Salvador Garriga Polledo (PPE-DE) to the Commission

(1 March 2001)

Subject: The Year of Languages and mobility amongst language teachers

Forty-three projects to which the Commission will be contributing funding in the region of 17 million have been selected to mark the Year of Languages organised by the European Union in 2001.

There is a feeling that preference ought to be given to those projects geared towards mobility amongst language teachers, so as to enable the latter to move to other Community Member States and pursue the different approaches to language teaching.

Will the Commission say which of the selected projects are geared towards facilitating mobility amongst language teachers across the European Union, and in what way it intends to encourage an increase in both the number of language teachers and their mobility, so as to enable them to teach languages anywhere in the Community?

Answer given by Mrs Reding on behalf of the Commission

(15 May 2001)

During the first selection round for projects financed under the European Year of Languages 2001, forty-three projects were selected, with a total grant funding of 1,7 million (and not 17 million) Euros. More projects will be funded under the second selection round.

The objectives of the European Year of Languages are to raise awareness of the richness of linguistic diversity, to encourage multilingualism and life long learning of languages and to disseminate information on this field. These objectives are reflected in the areas of action for proposals, which are laid down in the Call for Proposals for the European Year(1). Moreover, the purpose of the funding available under the European Year of languages is to complement, and not to duplicate, funding available under other actions and programmes. It would therefore not have been appropriate to fund teacher mobility, which is already funded in other ways.

In particular, since 1990, through the Lingua and Socrates programmes, the Commission has invested significant amounts in the training and mobility of teachers of a foreign language. It has done this in three main ways:

- by encouraging teacher training institutions to work in partnership across Europe to produce quality teacher training materials and courses; since 1991, almost 22 million has been spent to co-fund these projects;

- by giving grants to individual teachers to enable them to follow an in-service training course abroad; between 1991 and 1999, a total of 53 600 foreign language teachers received an average grant of 1 000 each; and

- by funding assistantships abroad for future teachers of a foreign language; between 1996 and 1999, 13,2 million was allocated to this action and over 2 800 future foreign language teachers undertook Lingua Assistantships.

Further information is available in all eleven Community languages on the Commission's Learning Languages web site at http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/languages/es/index.html

In addition, the Leonardo da Vinci Programme supports exchanges of one to six weeks between the business sector on the one hand, and language vocational training establishments on the other, for the benefit of language trainers and mentors.

The Socrates programme's Arion action enables education professionals to travel abroad to study other countries' educational systems and approaches to common issues. In 2000-2001, 15 Arion study visits addressing some 180 education specialists and decision makers were scheduled. A similar number of events will take place in 2001-2002.

(1) DG EAC 66/00.