Professor Lorna Carson

LIFELANGS Living Observatory of Shared Languages and Identities on the Island of Ireland is a Strand II Emerging Hubs of Excellence project funded under the Higher Education Authority North South Research Programme (NSRP). It is a large-scale, four-year research project exploring linguistic and cultural diversity, social cohesion, and inclusivity in Ireland and Northern Ireland. The LIFELANGS project is led jointly by a team from Trinity College Dublin and Queen's University Belfast. The team is creating a multilingual and multimodal corpus, conducting two nationwide surveys, and developing evidence-based teaching and learning language and intercultural materials. The Living Observatory embeds two core theoretical concepts: critical interculturality and intersectionality. Critical interculturality moves beyond functional notions of intercultural competence to focus on the transformative intercultural capacities that are required to enable contemporary societies to become conscious about their internal diversities, and more inclusive and equitable. Acknowledging the complex interrelationships between multiple axes of power in society, LIFELANGS examines how cultural and linguistic identities intersect with dimensions such as age, gender, class, health, disability, sexuality, race, religion, and ethnicity. We employ a mixed-method approach, broadly interpretivist, transformative, and participatory in design. The project's datasets will be freely available online through an interactive interface employing a GIS-enabled mapping function. We are a multidisciplinary team of 20 researchers, including 5 post-doctoral fellows and 4 doctoral students. We are collaborating with 20 established partners, including cross-border agencies, grassroots organisations, teacher-education colleges, charities, schools, language advocacy groups, and examination/qualification bodies. We draw on citizen science and crowdsourcing in our research design, data collection and meaning-making.

The READ With MEE (Multilingual Early Education) project addresses the need to support literacy development in young multilinguals aged 2-6, especially those from minority and migrant language backgrounds. It is a three-year Erasmus+ KA2 Cooperation Partnership (2023"2026) that aims to close the achievement gap facing multilingual children from national, regional, migrant, and refugee minority backgrounds by supporting their literacy development across their full linguistic repertoire. Its work packages centre on promoting interactive, engaging book reading in early childhood education and care settings, libraries, and homes, built on close collaboration with researchers and practitioners to ensure evidence-based, field-relevant tools. The project's concrete outputs include its Handbook-INC: Multiliteracy Development for All, a plain-language guide to research findings and practical recommendations developed from a state-of-the-art literature review (available in English, Basque, Frisian, Spanish, Dutch, and Irish), a series of expert-interview and best-practice videos, an online library of inclusive multilingual books and resources, and an interactive app-based reading game offering a shared multilingual story experience in ten languages. Together these tools aim to strengthen professional and parental knowledge of multilingual early literacy, foster positive attitudes towards linguistic diversity, and give practitioners and families across Europe practical means to support young multilingual learners' language development.

The BAQONDE project was a three-year Erasmus+ Capacity Building in Higher Education project, led by the University of Salamanca, in partnership with North-West University, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and Rhodes University in South Africa, University of Groningen and Trinity College Dublin in Europe. Its name (meaning understand in the Nguni languages of South Africa) reflects its central aim: tackling the inequalities of a higher education system that often disadvantages students whose mother tongue is an indigenous African language, by promoting the use, development, and academic recognition of these languages within South African universities. BAQONDE established African Language Development Units (ALDUs) across partner institutions, developing educational and terminological materials for teaching in indigenous languages across different disciplines, running research seminars and methodology workshops for multilingual contexts, and organising exchange visits and training for students and early-career researchers. The project also built lasting public engagement through outreach activities, school visits, research-based multilingual toolkits, and awareness-raising events in South African communities.

The INCLUDEED project addressed the social inclusion of disadvantaged groups in Europe, specifically the needs of immigrants and refugees who already possessed basic host-language skills, by helping them move beyond linguistic competence alone towards socio-pragmatic competence, drawing on research from the field of applied linguistics. The project's work packages centred on developing accessible, data-driven, learner-focused teaching methodologies and personalised learning environments, producing a free multilingual online course explicitly framed around sociopragmatic integration ("A Step Forward"/"Un paso adelante," available in six languages), alongside a companion "Guide for the Linguistic Inclusion of Migrants" (in Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese) addressing the practical and cultural challenges of migrant integration, based on research findings in the field.

VirtuLApp (Virtual Language App) was a three-year Erasmus+ KA2 Strategic Partnership project, coordinated by the Mercator European Research Centre/Fryske Akademy together with partners including ATiT (Belgium), LUCA School of Arts (Belgium), Trinity College Dublin, and the University of the Basque Country (Spain). The project addressed the needs of teachers working in increasingly multilingual classrooms by building their knowledge of multilingual didactics, supporting the integration of migrant and minority languages, and reducing unnecessary language separation in teaching. Its activities centred on developing an innovative multididactic approach and toolkit for classroom use, comprising a digital handbook answering teachers' frequently asked questions, a series of didactical videos showcasing best practices from across Europe, a gallery of expert interviews, and BabelAR, an augmented-reality language-learning game designed to boost pupils' motivation and self-regulated, collaborative learning. These outputs were shared and refined through a series of multiplier events and workshops. VirtuLApp's tools remain freely available. The project was awarded second prize at the NUFFIC Europees Talenlabel (European Language Label awards) in 2021 for its contribution to innovative language education. The project's BabelAR game won Gold in the Digital Product category at the Henry van de Velde Awards 2022 and was nominated for the Belgian Game Awards 2021 (Best Non-Entertainment Title of the Year).