Erasmus+ project ‘Towards an Integrated Bilingual Model’
Towards an Integrated Bilingual Model – IBmodel is an Erasmus+ project for educational innovation in the field of bilingual education/Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) coordinated by the Santos Mártires de Córdoba Foundation and involving the Universities of Porto and Córdoba, and the Eurolingue network of language schools in Sicily. Working CLIL members Maria Ellison and Andrew Sampson are involved in this innovative project.
The project aims to respond to needs that arise in the implementation of bilingual programmes in Europe in three ways:
– the development of digital tests which assess subject specific academic language of primary and secondary level students;
– the creation of gamified digital materials – BILINGUAL ME – which will support the acquisition of vocabulary and structures related to Natural and Social Sciences using the Genially platform;
– the improvement of teacher coordination within programmes through innovative tools such as our CHECK IT APP which will also offer effective, personalised attention to students in real time.
The Faculty of Arts and Humanities, U. Porto (FLUP) and the University of Cordoba have designed subject-specific digital tests that will determine the ability of primary and secondary level students to use the academic language needed during the learning of academic content. Local schools in the three national contexts will be invited to take part in the piloting of these tests. Data collected will be used to analyze the efficacy of the tests as tools to determine the linguistic abilities of students. Once this data has been collected and analyzed, the results will be shared with individual schools. In addition to the trialling of tests, schools will also be invited to use the digital materials BILINGUAL ME and the teacher coordination tool CHECK IT APP developed by Santos Mártires de Córdoba and Eurolingue.
At the end of the trial period all the tools that are being developed by the IBmodel project will be available to schools for professional support in their bilingual/CLIL programmes.
From March to June 2022 training seminars for teachers, programme coordinators and key stakeholders in bilingual education will be held in Cordoba, Porto and Palermo. Those held in Porto will take place in April, 2022. In addition, FLUP will hold a conference on Assessment in CLIL in September, 2022.
The IBmodel project will end in 2023 with an International Conference on Bilingualism at the University of Cordoba.
For further information about the project, consult the IBmodel site:
