Manipal University has bagged the prestigious Capacity Building project in Higher Education offered by the European Union under the Erasmus Plus programme.
A press release issued by the university here on Friday said that the three-year project carries a grant of € 564178 (about Rs. 4 crore) to develop a Centre for Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), a teaching-learning methodology in schools to address issues related to multilingualism.
The CLIL model involves six languages to begin with. They are Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Hindi and English.
H. Vinod Bhat, Vice-Chancellor, Manipal University said, “It is a matter of pride to bag the grant as we are the only ones from India to receive this funding as a lead applicant. This is the largest grant for humanities and social sciences in Manipal University.”
Final listManipal University found a place in the final list of 147 projects from among 736 applications from all over the world. Incidentally, it was the only university from India in the final list.
Neeta Inamdar, Head of the Department of European Studies (DES), Manipal University, said, “This is a model that makes bilingual learning easier and better to equip young learners to grasp the content through language thus enhancing both their knowledge base and language skills simultaneously.
ModelThis model encouraged and adopted by the European Union is suitable to multilingual India and can address the medium of instruction issues that exist across states,” she said.
The project involves training young teachers in this bilingual teaching method which has its own techniques.
If given the right impetus by the policy makers, this can change the language learning methods in the country and create a fair balance between learning English and native languages, she said. This project is planned in partnership with European and Indian universities such as University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), University of Milano (Italy), University of Latvia (Latvia) and Symbiosis International University, Pune, Pondicherry University and Chitkara University.
Associate partnersThe project also has associate partners like Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz (Germany), Italian University Line, Rosie Tanner Education Consultant.
Earlier last week, the DES was also selected for the prestigious Jean Monnet grant of € 43,200 towards a policy debate on higher education, Bologna process and internationalisation of Indian universities.
The department has been a part of Erasmus Mundus, Erasmus Plus, Jean Monnet module and Marie Curie programmes earlier.
Academically, DES offers an M.A. programme in European Studies. The Centre for Foreign Languages, a part of DES, offers certificate courses in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Mandarin.
