NEOLAiA will promote multilingualism and multiculturalism through a common language policy

The consortium of young European universities NEOLAiA coordinated by the University of Jaén held last week a meeting devoted to the ‘Extra-curricular program Work Package: Towards a multilingual and multicultural European iUniversity’, which aims to promote multilingualism and multiculturalism through a common language policy, improve the linguistic and intercultural competence of stakeholders through common accreditation criteria and to promote online and face-to-face mobility to strengthen the feeling of European citizenship, among other objectives.

This package is coordinated by the University of Jaén, being María Luisa Pérez Cañado, English Philology Professor and Rector’s Delegate for European Universities and Language Policy, the main responsible for the activities and contents of this part of the project. “The initiatives included in this work package, such as the accreditation certificate for multilingual education or the multilingual / multicultural  education quality assessment framework, are original and innovative and will be essential to strengthen the linguistic and methodological preparation of teaching staff and students in the participating universities, in order to face multilingual education with quality guarantees,” says María Luisa Pérez.

Furthermore, during the meeting, some technical aspects of the ‘Common Certificate of Accreditation for Multilingual Education’ were proposed and developed, an activity that aims to establish a system of automatic recognition of existing language certificates in the partner universities and to create a joint and automatically recognised accreditation certificate for multilingual education.