A few notes on PASS, a European project for language education

This paper briefly presents a European Lifelong Learning Programme (LLP) project aimed at fostering language education and thinking skills for very young learners (aged 4-6) through their parents entitled PASS (“Parents as Successful TeacherS”). The project, supported by a consortium of different European institutions, is grounded on an integrated approach to the development of language and thinking skills, namely the Thinking Approach (TA) to language learning (Altshuller 1984; 1996; 1999; Sokol 2007; Sokol et al. 2008). The project also intends to develop forms of bilingualism and language awareness (Hamers and Blanc 1989; Montrul 2008). Two aspects of the project appear to be particularly innovative: firstly the idea of going beyond the official border of educational settings by involving some non-formal – e.g. familiar – contexts to enhance language learning and multilingualism, and secondly the use of TRIZ, the theory of inventive problem solving based on dialectical logic, to which the TA is closely linked. The purpose of the project is to create pedagogical tools that will enable parents to transform any kind of situation into a learning activity. Learning by doing facilitates the natural acquisition of the foreign language as language elements are incorporated in and filter through real, often funny or attractive activities. The paper also refers to a previous LLP project entitled TETRIS (“Teaching TRIz at School”), which exploits creativity and innovation for educational purposes and exemplifies the governing philosophy of TRIZ. Although there are several challenges for the implementation of the project, it is hoped that the usefulness of the TA in educational contexts and programmes may start to spread in order to improve simultaneously language learning and thinking skills, and thus develop opportunities, growth and progress for individuals and society.