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  • Imagining the future of multilingualism: education and society at a turning pointThe CEL/ELC virtual forum: a short report and some comments
  • Piet Van de Craen

On 3–4 December 2020 the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan organised the bi-annual CEL/ELC forum. This event took place in difficult circumstances while Brexit, Covid and pandemic raged and the world is confronted with counter-productive anti-democratic, anti-scientific and anti-multicultural opinions and fake news. As with so many other events, the forum took place in a virtual environment. Despite this, 200 participants had enrolled. The bi-annual forum offers an opportunity to the ELC participants to discuss current European issues related to the area of languages in its broadest sense. In that sense a forum is different from a conference where attention to research results are more prominent. This report discusses briefly the issues discussed at the forum and offers some comments related to the future of multilingualism in Europe and the future of the ELC in particular.1

Let me begin by briefly recalling what the Conseil Européen pour les Langues/European Language Council (CEL/ELC) actually stands for. It is an association of institutions of higher education founded to actively promote European cooperation between institutions of higher education in the area of languages. Its role is to identify new issues and new cultural, social and professional needs, to raise awareness of them and coordinate actions designed to address them.

Concretely and in particular, the CEL/ELC seeks i) to provide a forum for debate and joint policy development for institutions of higher education; ii) to enter in dialogue with other sectors of education, European, national and international organisations and institutions; iii) to initiate, support and [End Page 121] contribute to projects in education, training and research; iv) to gather, exchange and disseminate information relevant to the field; v) to propose actions to enhance the quality of language learning and language teaching; vi) to raise awareness of the importance of linguistic diversity in the production, transmission and acquisition of knowledge; vii) to provide a joint and targeted response to the challenges posed by a multilingual and multicultural Europe (see the ELC website http://www.celelc.org).

Initiated in 1997 by Wolfgang Mackiewicz from Freie Universität Berlin, between 1997 and 2014 no less than fourteen major projects were launched. Among them Sigma, three Thematic Network Projects, Dialang, Lanqua and Intluni to name but a few (see the ELC website for more information). As well as this, the High Level Group on Multilingualism, whose report was written by Mackiewicz, produced a highly significant document that deserves to be much more widely known than it is today (see Commission 2007). All these projects aimed to enhance European cooperation in the area of languages and they lead to general conclusions that are far from outdated and, after all these years, still read as a handout for future action that seems as simple as it is relevant:

  • • multilingualism is here to stay and has the greatest significance for the good of society and for the well-being of individuals;

  • • motivation is a key aspect and it starts at elementary school;

  • • language learning is vitally important for dialogues on all levels if integration is taken seriously;

  • • communication between language providers, including education institutions and enterprises, has to be promoted;

  • • changes in the European Union, such as migration and globalisation lead to new requirements such as language mediation and interlingual communication;

  • • regional and minority languages form part of Europe’s diversity and its multilingual landscape (see Commission 2007).

The programme of the 2020 forum naturally reflected on some of the aspects just mentioned, i.e. among others, individual multilingualism and its relationship to “openness” and “creativity”, linguistic sensitivity, transcultural competence, assessing interculturality, sustaining language learning, critical thinking in intercultural dialogue and linguistic rights and varieties. One of the more interesting points emerging from many contributions as well as during discussions, was the question of the existence (or not) of a European identity [End Page 122] with specific human values. Clearly, this could be the topic of another forum because the idea is as stimulating as it is complex and controversial...

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