Overview
The vision of Chain Stories is to encourage young children and even their families to appreciate the commonness of European families of languages (Romance, Germanic, Slavic).
Mission
ChainStories will create a language friendly environment in which young language learners are motivated to comprehend and write stories in related languages. The project aims to improve language-learning motivation, encourage an awareness of other European countries and improve written expression.
In the school year 2007 – 2008, the first pilot of a Chain Story was completed in 5 schools in France, Italy, Portugal, Romania and Spain with amazing and exciting results. The mission is clearly being over-achieved. A teacher said, “When the children are motivated they achieve the unthinkable”, A pupil said, “The class for me was spectacular.” In the present school year, 2008 – 2009, five simultaneous chains have been carried out in the same countries. The excellent results from the first pilot stage have once again been achieved.
About
Children write part of a story, in the language of their school, and then pass it on to the next school in a chain of 5 schools in 5 countries. They decode the meaning of the previous and later parts of the same story written by the other schools in the Chain.
The 5 schools are within recognized language groups. The children illustrate the story and share and communicate with the other schools in their Chain.
Target group
The target group for the project is young language learners, between the ages of 8 to 12 years, in 500 to 2000 schools in Europe. In addition, their parents, teachers, trainers, in fact everyone who is touched by the project, by contributing to the writing of stories, managing the Chains of schools and helping the children comprehend the stories.
By being involved in the Chain Story process, the young students get an insight into the languages used in the creation of other parts of their story, and use guessing strategies to understand and comprehend the events. They use the clues to help them write their own part of the Chain Story.
The process is designed to create a model that can be exported to the wider educational world and offer an interesting, experiential, learning experience about languages for young students, in partnership with their teachers and families.
The methodology of the project development is described fully here.
You can see a story created by pupils by selecting the link in the tool bar at the top of the page.
The project partners come from all levels of language education; full details can be found on the Partner page.
The project is funded by the European Union Socrates Lingua programme that aims to promote the learning of languages across Europe.
