PLURIDENTITIES

Acronym: PLURIDENTITIES
Title: Protecting and stimulating plurilingual identities in learners in Europe via inclusive policies and classroom practices

We had the chance to interview Prof. Jill Surmont about PLURIDENTITIES:
You have recently received a Horizon Europe grant for the collaborative project PLURIDENTITIES: Protecting and stimulating plurilingual identities in learners in Europe via inclusive policies and classroom practices. This was a very competitive call, so massive congratulations!
We would like to ask you some questions about your new project:

What motivated you to apply when you saw the call?
When it comes to languages and language education, it is always hard to really instigate a sustainable impact, because (language) education is not just the work of one actor. It requires obviously educators and pupils, but also policymakers at different levels and teacher trainers. To ensure that a process of change is put in motion, you need to be able to work with all these different actors and find a way to make them work together towards the same goal. As a researcher, I always aim to build bridges between different fields and partners and create collaborations to find evidence-informed solutions for actual problems. This is because I want my work to have a (preferably lasting) impact on society. This call with its topic and its expected outcomes allowed our team to write a project that does exactly that.

What are the objectives of this project?
1)    Identity the role of educational policies in fostering multilingualism/language maintenance, as well as good practices and potential barriers in developing EU (language) identities, including the role, good practices and policies in terms of digitalisation and technology use in education
2)    Identify the impact of multilingual educational programs on attitudes and perceptions towards languages and provide solutions to protect the EU linguistic capital without rejecting the non-EU language background many (new) European citizens have
3)    Identify the impact of technology on multilingualism and language learning motivation of pupils and provide the work field with solutions and inspiration to tackle hot topics like ChatGPT, machine translation and speech technology in their classroom practice
What benefits will this project bring?

Concretely at the societal level, the resources produced by the project will have an impact on: (i) the level of training and professionalisation needed by teachers; and (ii) the method of content delivery in the class; and (iii) the way policy addresses and values the different languages. By addressing weaknesses and opportunities at these three levels, PLURIDENTITIES will create a more inclusive education environment in which the use of different languages is encouraged. PLURIDENTITIES will produce a strong evidence foundation that will be able to bring forward policy changes. Policy makers will not be mere recipients of the insights gained through the project, but will also be actively involved in the phase of data collection as providers of key input on current practices. This approach will help to reduce the gap between the academia and policy-makers, thus facilitating two-way communications and a stronger, long-lasting impact.

At a scientific level, the project will generate an important and much-needed body of knowledge about the processes and factors that lead to the valorisation of linguistic capital. The resulting empirical knowledge will be used to revise and update current theoretical frameworks in the field of Education, and the interventions that are developed by the PLURIDENTITIES consortium will be made available for testing in follow-up empirical studies. Furthermore, following anonymisation, the consortium will make the collected dataset publicly available — using F.A.I.R. principles — for other researchers interested in carrying out replication studies, or seeking to understand the influence of other variables on the development of linguistic identities and language acquisition. 
Finally, there is also an economic benefit linked to this project as studies have shown that plurilinguals have a stronger position on the job market. By understanding the factors leading to the low motivation to learn certain languages, more effective measures can be taken to prevent negative attitudes towards these languages. By fostering the inclusion of certain languages in the curriculum, the PLURIDENTITES project will, in the long-term, increase the plurilingualism of pupils, strengthen linguistic identities, create policies that protect the linguistic capital without excluding pupils’ heritage and give technology a facilitating role in all this. Through this, pupils will have a stronger position in the labour market with a broader range of career opportunities and better salary conditions.

How do you think this grant will benefit your career?
I am in the final year of my tenure track and a project like this will really boost my resume as international projects with a budget like this really helps me to tick all the boxes of the research objectives I have to reach. So I am hoping that this project will basically help me to “seal the deal” on my tenure track. Secondly (and more importantly) this project will strengthen my (international) position as a researcher and it will hopefully also teach me a lot about managing (big) projects. 

Maybe too early to ask, but… Are you planning on applying again for collaborative EU funding in the future? 
Absolutely. Although the template of these Horizon projects is not always very straightforward, I do really like writing these kinds of projects because it really allows you to create a narrative and to do it from different perspectives. The international collaboration also forces you to see things from these different perspectives, which in itself is very enriching. I would also like to highlight that the support that you get from the ERIS team while writing a Horizon project is amazing. Without them, I probably would not have attempted to submit a proposal for a project like this again (this was my second attempt) and I would thus not have been in this position where my proposal was actually granted. I would only recommend other researchers to bear in mind that after you’re granted the project, there is still quite some administrative work to be done before you can start and I did not anticipate that it would be this much.