multi-LITTÉRATIES
Immigration is of increasing importance in Europe and particularly in
Luxembourg. Among many success factors for integration, linguistic
integration or mastery of literacy skills in the language(s) of the host
country is considered a key element. In Luxembourg, however, immigrants
face a greater challenge to deal with the multiple languages of
Luxembourg (German, French, and Luxembourgish), together with their
alphabetic writing systems.
Funded by the European Integration
Fund (FEI) and by the Luxembourg Reception and Integration Agency
(OLAI), Project multi-LITERACIES (2011-2014) focuses on one of the most
challenging issues of linguistic integration, namely, the literacy
acquisition by “low-literate” adult immigrants in a “multilingual”
environment such as Luxembourg. This project is concerned with the
immigrant groups who are not functionally literate for roughly two
reasons: speakers who have had very little education (up to 5 years) in
their home countries for various reasons, on the one hand, and speakers
who have come from a country with a script that is divergent from Roman
alphabets, on the other hand.
The overall purpose of this project includes:
- To identify issues of (il)literacy in these groups in multilingual Luxembourg;
- To assess and monitor how to improve their written literacies of the languages of Luxembourg;
- To make personnel from ministries, municipalities and schools aware of this phenomena, and
- To equip the personnel with practical methods to develop and strengthen literacy in these groups.
