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Holi-Frysk 2.0

Frisian in secondary education: a holistic approach

Regional and minority languages, such as Frisian, are growingly coming into contact with migrant languages, as more migrants move to officially bi- or multilingual regions in Europe. Schools, already struggling to meet the standards for the national and foreign languages in the curriculum, are thus faced with the need to update their take on languages. However, how to handle this variety of languages in practice is unknown to many schools and teachers. While some research on holistic approaches (also called plurilingual approaches) for primary education has been carried out, secondary schools still remain under-explored.

Holi-Frysk 2.0

Holi-Frysk 2.0 is the successor of Holi-Frysk 1.0. Holi-Frysk 1.0 showed that using multilingualism in the classroom was of added value to the pupils and their development. The wish to continue this project with more and improved activities, more schools and structured research on the effects of these activities on attitudes, proficiency and didactics, led to Holi-Frysk 2.0.

Project Activities     2.0 vs 1.0      
         Online                    

Research theme: Multilingualism and Language learning
Duration: 01/01/2019 - 30/06/2021
Coordinating partner: NHL/ Stenden University of Applied Sciences, research group Multilingualism & Literacy
Mercator staff: Inge Heslinga, Cor van der Meer
Funding: Province of Friesland
Collaboration with:  Mercator European Research Centre, Afûk, Cedin, Kurrikulum.Frl, University of Groningen

Project Activities

The project addresses this issue in the context of secondary education in the bilingual region of Friesland. The aims of the project are:

To develop an intervention which aims to create more positive attitudes for teachers and pupils towards (learning) the Frisian language and multilingualism. This intervention consists of the development of activities which are based on the specific questions or issues of the participating schools.

  1. To investigate the effects of this intervention on the attitudes of teachers and pupils, the proficiency of the pupils in Frisian and the multilingual didactics of the teachers.

The project has a bottom-up set-up:

  • Question about multilingualism issue from the school
  • Activity proposal from the project team by means of a matrix
  • Implementation of the activity by the teacher
  • Feedback of teacher on activity by means of an evaluation form
  • Optimisation of activity for the online toolbox

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Holi-Frysk 2.0 vs Holi-Frysk 1.0

Holi-Frysk 2.0 is the successor of Holi-Frysk 1.0. Holi-Frysk 1.0 showed that using multilingualism in the classroom was of added value to the pupils and their development. The wish to continue this project with more and improved activities, more schools and structured research on the effects of these activities on attitudes, proficiency and didactics, led to Holi-Frysk 2.0.

 

Holi-Frysk 1.0 resulted in the following developments:

  • Content-wise: the first activities for Frisian in language classes and content classes, inquiry-based learning as a principle to involve pupils more in their own learning process.
  • Methodologically: a method for working with teachers, also based on questions on multilingualism, top-down and in co-construction: cooperation between teachers and researchers, but also between teachers in one school, and between schools.
  • Organizational: school visits, study days for participating schools, presentations at workshops and conferences and a website with the theoretical framework on which the project is based, the developed activities.

 

Holi-Frysk 2.0 focus points

Although the results of Holi-Frysk 1.0 were mainly positive, there are a few points which could be improvded, which Holi-Frysk 2.0 will focus on:

  • Content-wisemore focus is needed on the connection between the subject Frisian and other subjects, more focus on reading and writing Frisian (in addition to other languages), which makes use of the language necessary, to prevent focusing only on improving attitudes towards Frisian.
  • Methodologicallymore schools of the same type are needed, which can collaborate more and better. More time should be invested in creating a team on each school to warrant the collaboration and to make the project (and its implementation in the educational system) more sustainable.
  • Organizationalthe developed activities should be embedded in EduFrysk, to make it accessible for participating schools, supplemented by a platform on EduFrysk where ideas and comments can be exchanged.

 

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Online

Site and social media

Please visit the project's website for more information and the latest reports: 

In addition Holi-Frysk 2.0 is active on social media: