Working Group 1

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AN INTEGRATED AND INCLUSIVE APPROACH TO FOUNDATIONAL LITERACY ACROSS EUROPE


The philosophy and practice of inclusive education has meant that in many countries struggling pupils are educated in mainstream schools. This implies that schools and teachers need to be able to identify and provide effective practices to support the skills of all pupils.

The focus of WG1 is on the foundational decoding and encoding processes involved in learning to read and write, and on overcoming the range of barriers that prevent children and adolescents from successfully developing this competence.

Importantly, the scientific agenda of this WG is build into the following three aspects of inclusiveness: breadth of theoretical and methodological approaches, inclusion across countries and languages, and inclusion across learners.

Relying on the interdisciplinary work of researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers coming from different backgrounds and disciplinary traditions as well as using different methodological approaches, WG1 aims to enhance an inclusive and integrated approach to understanding and supporting the development of foundational literacy skills for all learners, thereby widening participation, improving attainments, and raising aspirations.

Objectives

  • Establish a database detailing the ways in which the teaching of literacy skills is integrated across European contexts (in cooperation with WG2).
  • Examining the ways in which the teaching and learning of reading at word, sentence, and text level is integrated with the teaching of writing at word, sentence, and text level.
  • Describe the ways in which teachers aim to meet learner needs for reading and writing in classroom contexts from early years to adolescence.
  • Examine effective interventions for learners challenged by literacy across European languages in mainstream classrooms.
  • Elaborate models that aim to elucidate the comorbidity with specific learning difficulties.
  • Provide a database of current evidence about effective teaching drawing on the recently established What Works database.
  • Examine statistical models for measuring change over time.
  • Train ESR in the profiling of pupils skills and the ways of interpreting variation in individual performance in comparison to group averages.
  • Develop collaborative research and apply for funding within H2020.

Teams

Working group leaders: Julie Dockrell and Timothy Papadopoulos

 A. Spelling challenges across orthographies (team leader: Julie Dockrell)

B. Methodological issues in cross-linguistic literacy research (team leader: Timothy Papadopoulos)

C. Terminology, multilingualism, and L2 (team leader: Rhona Stainthorp)

D. Teachers understanding of multilingualism (team leader: Charles Mifsud)            
Team members: Otília Sousa and Nina Gerdzhikova                                                                                                                                          
Survey "Teachers’ knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors towards multilingualism and the challenges of multilingual classrooms"

E. Dyslexia across Europe (team leaders: Marcin Szczerbinski and Ioannis Dimakos)      
Project "Dyslexia in your country – legal framework and assessment process"


Initiatives

First WG meeting was held in London in 22-23 June 2015
Second WG meeting was held in Prague in 7-8 November 2015
Third WG meeting was held in Ljubljana in 19-20 April 2016
The WG1+WG3 workshop was held in Nicosia in 4-6 November 2016
The WG1+WG2 workshop was held in Jyväskylä in 2-3 February 2017
Fourth WG meeting was held in La Valletta in 18-20 October 2017

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