Introducing FURLEUS: a cross-country, cross-stage, cross-level comparison of Friulian and Basque teachers’ language attitudes and motivation in search of best practices

Abstract

The main aim of this contribution is to introduce the FURLEUS project, whose acronym stands for FURLan (i.e., Friulian) + EUSkara (i.e., Basque) and which is funded within the Horizon 2020—Marie-Skłodowska Curie Actions—European Individual Fellowship. To contextualise it, an overview of the rich, dynamic and complex situation characterising multilingual education in the two European regions involved will also be provided. After a concise review of recent literature on teacher attitudes and motivation, the two contexts of interest for the research project will be presented. These are the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) in Spain, an internationally-known context for the success of the revitalisation of the Basque minority language within a multilingual educational system, and Friuli Venezia Giulia (FVG) in Italy, an Autonomous Region whose Special Statute is deeply linked with its linguistic diversity and which is striving to implement the teaching of and through Friulian within multilingual education in its schools. A theoretical review of the main research studies underpinning the project as well as some relevant contextual background for both the BAC and FVG will be offered. Then, the outline of the FURLEUS project will be described and, finally, a few remarks on why it matters will conclude the chapter.