more-in A five-day workshop on how to strike a balance in bilingual learning through an emerging model, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), will be held at the MU-FAIMER Conference Room in Health Sciences Library Building here from Tuesday. The workshop on bilingual learning will be inaugurated by H. Vinod Bhat, Vice-Chancellor, Manipal University, at 9 a.m. Kannada writer and literary critic T.P. Ashoka, keynote speaker at the workshop, will deliver a lecture on “Bilingualism in Karnataka: Natural State or Ideological Choice?” The CLIL model has been developed and applied in European schools to bring about a balance between languages when two of them are taught together as different subjects. “Inability to learn a native language properly as a result of schooling in English medium and vice-versa is at the extreme ends of a continuum. Both these models of bilingual learning have shortcomings that can be answered by CLIL,” says Neeta Inamdar, Head, Department of European Studies, Manipal University and Leader of the CLIL@India Consortium. “The major focus is to create a public debate on the existing models of bilingual teaching in public and private schools and rural and urban environment. The objective is to reduce the gap between the two and to equip students to acquire two or more languages at a better level of proficiency,” Dr. Inamdar added. Under the project CLIL@India funded by the European Union, Manipal University along with other partner universities is planning to develop a new model of bilingual education for schools and experiment it in some schools and eventually provide an evidence-based policy suggestion. CLIL-based modules will be developed in four languages — Kannada, Tamil, Marathi and Punjabi, as Pondicherry University, Symbiosis International University Pune, and Chitkara University Punjab are partners. European partners in the project include University of Milano (Italy), University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), and University of Latvia. This project is funded under the Erasmus Plus Capacity Building to the tune of € 5,85,000. It is implemented by qualified educationists in the country, led by Manipal University.

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