Subjects: MA Internship
Organisation: NHL Noordelijke Hogeschool
University supervisor: Dr. Charlotte Gooskens
Internship supervisor: Mirjam Günther
Final date internship: 30-04-2020
MORE OPPORTUNITIES WITH MULTILINGUALISM
Name of Student: Zuleyha OPREA Student Number: S4134117
Course: Master Multilingualism
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION ...3
2. e-3M PROJECT ...3
2.1 Principles of e-3M tool ...5
3. TASKS DURING THE INTERNSHIP...6
4. EVALUATION OF INTERNSHIP ...7
5. CONCLUSION ...8
6. REFERENCES ...8
1. INTRODUCTION
In today’s world, economic, political and social circumstances drive people to migrate somewhere that they can peacefully live and raise their children. European countries have been one of the attractive destinations for the immigrants due to the mentioned reasons. According to EU statistics on international migration, 21.8 million non-member country citizens live in an EU member state. The largest number of non-EU immigrants are found in the following countries respectively: Germany (10.1 million), Italy (5.3 million), France (4.9 million) and Spain (4.8 million) (Eurostat). These migrations have created a multicultural and multilingual atmosphere in the immigrant-receiving countries. Even if most of the countries try to eliminate these circumstances under the name of integration, ‘mother tongue’ has always been a sensitive matter among immigrants and they have kept going to hand down their home language to the next generations. However, ‘being a bilingual/multilingual’ person is seen as an obstacle for integration to society and a reason for lower school life. Therefore, immigrants have been encouraged not to use their mother tongue (Bezcioglu-Göktolga & Yagmur, 2018). Yet, this assumption is not based on a scientific justification. There are a lot of researches that showed us that bilingualism has positive influences on educational, cognitive and social outcomes (Agirdag, 2014). Currently, some governments have started to focus on the scientific facts and implement a multilingual education for the sake of immigrant pupils. Although these implementations are quite few, it is a promising step that can trigger many others.
The Netherlands which is also an immigrant receiving country and it has over 4 million immigrants (24% of total population) is one of the countries in which the important steps have been initiated to provide a multilingual education (Central Bureau of Statistics 2019 [CBS]). During this process, one of the experienced troubles was the way of instruction. Since multilingual education is not a common phenomenon in practice, teachers do not possess a necessary education and experience to implement this new approach in education. Another encountered issue is the appropriate materials in multilingual education. As it is quite hard to expect teachers to speak all minority languages that are spoken in the class, digital tools, more specifically computer-based learning, have become an inevitable option for this purpose. Also, researches showed that computer-based learning environments (CBLEs) influence students’ learning process positively (Van Laere et al., 2017). There are several projects using CBLEs and “aiming to foster pupils’ knowledge acquisition through the inclusion of support in their home language” (Van Laere et al., 2017, p.99). One of these projects is ‘e-3M Project’. 3M comes from ‘meer kansen met meertaligheid’ which means more opportunities with multilingualism. This internship report will reflect on the last three months (February, March and April 2020) in the e-3M Project at NHL Noordelijke Hogeschool
In this report, first of all, the e-3M project will be presented in detail. Then, the tasks that I completed during the internship will be discussed. Finally, the evaluation of the internship is going to be mentioned.
2. e-3M PROJECT
The e-3M tool is developed in the context of the RAAK-PRO project 3M: More opportunities with Multilingualism (2017-2021) and this project was funded by the Practical Research
Agency (SIA). The e-3M is a CBLEs and provides content to multilingual education for primary school students. It is actually a digital tool in which students can access an interactive learning environment with different languages namely; Dutch, Frisian, English, Tigrinya, Arabic, Polish, Turkish and Chinese. This project is developed by Afûk, teachers from 3M project schools and researchers who are experts on Multilingualism & Literacy (Duarte, 2020, p.2).
Two themes were developed for this tool: (i) Birds and (ii) Bridges. These themes were selected by teachers and experts in the project and then started to produce materials for the themes. The following aspects were taken into account while improving the materials:
• Searching for challenging content;
• The choice of different collaborative working methods; • Focus on changing skills (speaking, listening, reading, writing); • Learning the connection between language and content; • Connection between language and culture;
• The multilingualism of the students;
• Immersion in the six languages in addition to moments of language awareness and language comparison;
• Attractive and playful ways to present the assignments (Duarte, 2020, p.2).
Figure 1: 3M tools (Duarte, 2020)
When we look at the tools that the 3M project provides for multilingual education, we can see that there are three different 3M tools. As it is mentioned before, the first tool is e-3M which offers different types of tasks to the groups of students with multilingual choices. The second tool is a 3M video box in which videos with different languages for multilingual education are provided. The third tool is 3M platform which is an online platform to share multilingual teaching approaches and materials (Duarte, 2020, p.2).
speaking with different language options. Students are able to change the language during activities. For the possibility that students cannot read their home languages, all the activities are read out to be able to help students to use and improve their home language. For the languages like Arabic, Tigrinya and Chinese, Latin script is added to the environment. For the text assignments which contain a lot of text, the screen can be divided into two; so, while students are listening in one language, they can read in another language. This option again helps the students who are not able to read or write their home languages. Other than a switch button to change the language, the e-3M offers a multimodal environment. In addition to texts on the screen/photos, a digital voice for the texts are also available. Multimodality in the environment shows itself in the assignments as well. There are different types of assignments for multilingual students such as working together on a task, games, presentation assignments, fact-sheet assignments, quizzes etc. Thanks to these opportunities, students can develop their language skills (Duarte, 2020, p.2).
2.1 Principles of e-3M tool
The e-3M tool follows several principles and one of them is “Inquiry-based learning (IBL)”. “IBL is an educational strategy in which students follow methods and practices similar to those of Professional scientists in order to construct knowledge” (Pedaste et al., 2015, p.48). In this learning approach, skills to solve a problem is one of the focal points. Furthermore, this approach emphasizes the role of the learner and its responsibility to discover the knowledge (Pedaste et al., 2015). This approach in the e-3M enables students to develop the knowledge with the guidance of their teacher, discuss their ideas and observations (Duarte, 2020, p.2). In other words, IBL develops their cognitive skills, creativity, and cooperation with their peers.
The second principle that the e-3M follows is “Content and Language Integrated Learning(CLIL)”. “CLIL is an approach to foreign language learning that requires the use of a second language to practise content” (Zarobe & Catalán, 2009, P.11). In the context of the e-3M, English and Frisian are the foreign languages for Dutch speaking students and English is a foreign language for Frisian speaking children since they are Dutch-Frisian bilinguals. When we look at how CLIL is implemented in the e-3M, we can firstly see that two themes (birds and bridges) are available in 8 languages. Also, apart from content, there are various tasks in which students can get linguistic help to process the content. Vocabulary lists in different languages, tables of phrases etc. are a few examples that show us how CLIL is implemented (Duarte, 2020, p.2).
The third principle that the e-3M follows is multimodality. As it is mentioned before, the e-3M offers the contents in different modalities. Joint assignments, games, informative texts, listening commands, videos, writing exercises are some of the different modalities that e-3M follows. Also, students have an option to choose between these modalities. For example, students can select the reading or listening text, or both ways to understand the text better (Duarte, 2020, p.2).
The fourth principle is differentiation which means that differences between students are taken into account. To this respect, e-3m does not focus on a coherent learning result at the end of tasks. That is why, teachers divide students into groups and before working on the environment, teachers give instructions about the environment to students. Also the
environment provides students with different levels of assignments like beginner (e.g. with multiple choice answers), intermediate (e.g. with fill-the-gap) and advanced (e.g. open answers) to be able to promote children to engage in the environment as much as possible (Duarte, 2020, p.2).
The final principle of the e-3M tool is “scaffolding”. "Scaffolding refers to providing contextual supports for meaning through the use of simplified language, teacher modeling, visuals and graphics, cooperative learning and hands-on learning" (Ovando, Collier, & Combs, 2003, p. 345). In the environment, students are provided contextual support through the use of both oral non-academic language and written academic language.
3. TASKS DURING THE INTERNSHIP
There were several tasks that I completed during the internship. As it is mentioned above, there are two themes in the e-3M tool which are Birds and Bridges. My first task was to translate these two themes from English into Turkish. In each team, there are informative texts, word and phrase tables, games related to the themes, multiple choice questions, gap-filling questions, quizzes and many other different types of tasks. Each theme had approximately 9000 words to translate and it took a month to translate two themes. The next step after finishing the translation was to make the audio-recordings of each theme. There are currently 8 different languages in the platform and it is taken into account that students may not read and write their home languages. That is why, each part of the themes was also recorded to be able to provide them a multimodal environment. Thanks to this opportunity, the ones who do not read and write their languages have a change to improve their home language competences. Final step with the translations of the themes was to upload them to the system and then double check the platform in Turkish. Uploading them to the system was done by another colleague; yet, I also helped when it was needed since they did not know Turkish language.
First phase of the internship was planned as it is explained above. The second phase of the internship included implementing and evaluating the e-3M with students in Friesland. During this process, the target was to check the learning process and results of students when working with the online-platform. Also, how they work with the materials, what they learn and how they use the different languages were planned to examine at the end of evaluation. Another goal was to look at the effect of switching languages on students’ results. Since students have a chance to change languages during the tasks, it was also planned to look at the results whether switching language affects their result at the end of tasks or not. However, because of Covid-19, the last step (checking results and observing pupils while working with the online platform) was not accomplished completely. Some schools in Friesland were visited and the platform was introduced to the schools and a pilot was implemented. Furthermore, as the Turkish translator of the themes, I was going to implement and evaluate a pilot with Turkish-speaking pupils in the Netherlands to investigate the use of Turkish language in their factsheet (a presentation that they do at the end of tasks). While doing this observation, the question: “How do they give place to Turkish language in the factsheet and how do they present it?” was going to be focused. However, schools were closed because of Covid-19 until the middle of May 2020. That is why the last step was not completed
but I am willing to help to implement the e-3M to schools and conduct the Turkish case study in the next term.
4. EVALUATION OF INTERNSHIP
I am from Turkey and its only official language is Turkish. As it is common across the globe, not recognizing the minority languages is also valid in Turkish and one of these languages is Kurdish. Kurdish is spoken by Kurds. Over 15 million Kurds live in Turkey which is almost 19% of the total population of Turkey (Central Intelligence Agency, CIA). Regardless of their high population in Turkey, they do not have the right to access an education in their mother tongue. Moreover, they do not have the right to do almost anything with their mother tongue. Witnessing these outdated attitudes and unpleasant experiences have always made me wonder what would happen if they could have access to an education in their mother tongue. One of the reasons why I started to MA Multilingualism is because of Kurdish community in Turkey. Therefore, I wanted to learn all the possible ways and techniques to implement multilingual education to schools. When I told my thoughts about Kurdish language and its place in Turkey to my teacher Dr. Joana Duarte, she mentioned the 3M project and the e-3M tool in which I could be a part of developing and implementing multilingual education tools for multilingual education. She provided me with a lot of sources to be able to search the project in detail. After all, I decided to do my internship in this project and I started it at the beginning of February 2020. My learning goals of my internship were:
Analyzing possible language learning strategies in multilingual schools.
An excellent experience to conduct both qualitative and quantitative research in a multilingual atmosphere with pupils
Observation of multilingual school atmosphere and developing possible new ways to implement a multilingual education
Observation of learning process and results of multilingual pupils during the implementation of the project
Having chance to develop and implement an approach for multilingual education To transfer and reinforce my academic knowledge about multilingual education Help the professionals and my colleagues in the project with new ideas
At the end of my internship, I got an evaluation from my supervisor Mirjam Günther, in which she only gave positive feedback for my duties and functioning. She was so kind, helpful, understanding, solution-oriented and professional in each step of my internship. I am so lucky and grateful to be able to have a chance to work with both Mirjam Günther and Joana Duarte during my internship.
5. CONCLUSION
My internship was planned to start in February 2020 and end at the beginning of April 2020. Due to Covid-19 circumstances and restrictions, it ended at the end of April. During my internship, I was involved in each step of developing CBLEs for multilingual education. During these steps, I had an opportunity to reinforce my academic knowledge about multilingual education in this environment. Also, I contributed to the project apart from my tasks by checking the online environment in each language, detecting the mistakes and informing my supervisor about them. This project also helped me to see the challenges of multilingual education and difficulties while developing and implementing a multilingual tool. Yet, these facts drove me to think what type of alternatives can be improved. Finally, this internship provided me to work with the prominent professionals in multilingual education and develop myself thanks to their leadership and knowledge in the field as well. I was planning to engage in this field for my future career. Thanks to my internship, I definitely want to be part of multilingual education from now on.
6. REFERENCES
Bezcioglu-Goktolga, I., & Yagmur, K. (2018). The impact of dutch teachers on FLP of turkish immigrant parents. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 31(3), 220–234.
Bordens, K. S., & Abbott, B. B. (1988). Research design and methods : a process approach. Mayfield Pub.Contexts. (3rd ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill.
Duarte, J. (2020). e3M visiedocument. Unpublished manuscript. Leewarden: NHL Stenden Hogeschool
Middle East: Turkey. Retrieve from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/tu.html
Migrant population: 21.8 million non-EU-27 citizens living in the EU-27 on 1 January 2019. (2020, May 20). Retrieved from https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Migration_and_migrant_population_statistics#Migrant_population:_2 1.8_million_non-EU-27_citizens_living_in_the_EU-27_on_1_January_2019
Orhan, A. (2014). The long-term effects of bilingualism on children of immigration: student bilingualism and future earnings. International Journal of Bilingual Education and
Bilingualism, 17(4), 449–464. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2013.816264
Ovando, C., Collier, V., & Combs, M. (2003). Bilingual and ESL Classrooms: Teaching Multicultural
Pedaste, M., Mäeots Mario, Siiman, L. A., Jong, de, A. J. M., Riesen, van, S. A. N., Kamp, E. T., Tsourlidaki, E. (2015). Phases of inquiry-based learning: definitions and the inquiry cycle. Educational Research Review, 14, 47–61.
Van Laere, E., Rosiers, K., Van Avermaet, P., Slembrouck, S., & van Braak, J. (2017). What can technology offer to linguistically diverse classrooms? using multilingual content in a computer-based learning environment for primary education. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural
Development, 38(2), 97–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2016.1171871
Zarobe, Y., & Catalán, R. (2009). "Introduction". In Introduction. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. doi: https://doi-org.proxy-ub.rug.nl/10.21832/9781847691675-003
Supervisor Evaluation Form
Career Strategy - Faculty of Arts, PO Box 716, 9700 AS Groningen, the Netherlands Tel.: +31 (0)50-363 5844; www.rug.nl/let/careerstrategy; stages.let@rug.nl
Evaluation form for placement providers
Placement provider: NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences Department: Lectorate of Multilingualism & Literacy
City: Leeuwarden
Country: The Netherlands
Name student: Zuleyha Oprea
Placement period: February 1st – April 30th 2020
Description of tasks
1. Which tasks have been performed by the student? (This concerns main tasks as described in the contract and possible other activities)
Zuleyha has been working on an online learning environment for the More Opportunities with More Languages project (3M-project). She has translated two themes (Birds and Bridges) from English into Turkish and also recorded the two themes.
2. To what extent has your organisation benefitted from the activities of the student and to what extent will you use the results?
O not at all O to some extent O sufficiently X to a large extent
3. What is your opinion about the quality of the content of the reports, notes, publications, research, translations, etc. written by the student?
O insufficient O sufficient
O good
X excellent
4. What is your opinion about the student’s writing skills? O insufficient
O sufficient
O good
X excellent
5. What is your opinion about the student’s oral skills? O insufficient
O sufficient
O good
X excellent
6. What is your opinion about the student’s accuracy and thoroughness? O insufficient
O sufficient
X good
O excellent
7. What is your opinion about the pace at which the tasks were performed? O insufficient
O sufficient
O good
X excellent
8. What is your opinion about the student’s organisational skills? O insufficient
O sufficient
O good
X excellent
9. In general, what is your opinion about the quality of the student’s performance? O insufficient
O sufficient
O good
X excellent
Evaluation of the student's functioning
10. What is your opinion about the student’s ability to perform his/her tasks independently?
O insufficient O sufficient
O good
X excellent
11. To what extent was the student interested in his/her tasks? O insufficient
O sufficient
O good
X excellent
12. To what extent was the student interested in other activities within your organisation?
O insufficient O sufficient
O good
X excellent
13. How did the interaction between supervisor and student develop? O badly
O not very well O well
X extremely well
14. How did the cooperation with co-workers develop? O badly
O not very well O well
X extremely well
15. What is your opinion about the student’s level of knowledge? O insufficient
O sufficient
O good
X excellent
16. To what extent did the student's attitude fit in with the work climate of your organisation? O insufficient O sufficient O good X excellent Additional questions
17. Have there been problems supervising the student?
X No
18. In future, would you again offer a placement to a student of the Faculty of Arts? X Yes, because this year’s students have again shown how high the quality of the students
is, even in very difficult circumstances.
O No, because………..
19. Would you now or in the future appreciate a meeting with the supervising university lecturer or the placement coordinator of the Faculty?
O Yes
X No
20. Do you have further question or comments?
Zuleyha has done a fabulous job adjusting to the circumstances she was thrown into, due to the Covid-19 virus. We’re very happy with the work she’s managed to do for us and we’re sure many pupils will happily work with the Turkish version of the online learning
