On local, national and international bases
|
It is important to find the right person to mediate a project. In this
short
video, we hear how adaptation was challenged by the fact that the Swedish
participant in the Parents project worked with a different sector from
the focus of the project.
EPOSTL (European Portfolio for Student Teachers of Languages)
has
national EPOSTL coordinators
in a number of countries, who can mediate the project with other
teachers in those countries.
Some projects contain ideas on
dissemination, e.g.
DOTS
(Developing Online Teaching Skills).
Most projects have a number of
power point presentations
available for downloading on their website, e.g. the
ECEP (Encouraging the culture of evaluation among professionals) project.
In some cases the presentations are available as
PDFs.
See also the
presentations
on a number of areas relating to the
RelEx (Classroom Assessment related to the Common European Framework of
Reference for Languages) project.
The
LACS (Language associations and collaborative support)
projects promote collaboration between language teacher associations and
other organisations in order to support one another. Language teacher
associations are in a strong position to communicate with members,
disseminating and mediating the projects so they can be used in
classrooms.
Here are a number of examples from LKPA (the national Modern Language
Teacher Association) in Lithuania:
• News
from ECML and video
And also from EVOL in Estonia, showing how they have collaborated with
their neighbour association in Lithuania:
• 4 December 2010 Conference
"Language Teacher and Teaching in the Whirl of Changes” with Eglė Šleinotienė’s Plenary “Prospects and Perspectives for
Language Teachers as Members of Language Teachers’ Association”
• Egle also conducted a
workshop, “The Challenge of Being a Member of a Language Teachers’
Association“.
• A bulletin can be used to
provide information about ECML/LACS project/FIPLV/NBR Bulletin on the
Association website
(Archive 2010)
• In 2011 an
EVOL conference
was held focused on ECML projects. The plenary speaker was Sauli
Takala, ECML consultant
• EVOL’s 5th Anniversary Conference
was held 15 November 2014 and the programme contained information about
its involvement in LACS, FIPLV, and NBR activities. An
article
about the conference (including information about the ECML, LACS, FIPLV,
NBR activities) was produced, as well as articles in the Estonian
Teachers Networks Newsletter.
The
LACS Handbook
offers many ideas for language teacher associations offering training
and development activities to teachers. Collaboration is key to the
LACS (Language associations and collaborative support) project, and it is
developing an ongoing
Directory of Language Organisations, which will help individuals, institutions or organisations to find
partners for a range of activities, from conferences to research
projects.
Projects can be mediated in different countries by use of a range of
languages to capture the interest of potential users, e.g.
video
clips of relevance of
DOTS (Developing Online Teaching Skills) in 17 different
countries.
|
International mediation
|
Some projects lend themselves to being used to support international
collaboration e.g. creating and marketing an EFL Online application, as
part of various Masters programmes on Applied Linguistics, Computer
Science and International Business in Greece, Lithuania and Iceland (Case study 1, E-VOLLution, pp. 117-124).
|
National mediation
|
The Greek project related to the
ELP-WSU (The European Language Portfolio in whole-school use) was conceived and managed by a government agency, and its purpose was
to introduce the ELP to foreign language teachers and learners at
primary level throughout the country. It was organised in two phases. In
the first, a thousand teachers of French and German attended in-service
courses on using the ELP, and in the second the ELP was piloted in
classrooms. The project was evaluated using three instruments:
questionnaires completed by teachers; semi-structured interviews with
school principals; and observations carried out by pedagogical advisers
for foreign languages. The project was warmly welcomed and fully
achieved its objectives: to familiarise teachers with classroom use of
the ELP, to motivate learners to be more autonomous in their learning,
and to acknowledge the value of plurilingual and pluricultural learning
and experience. See
case study
from Greece.
Language teacher associations have many strategies for communicating and
mediating ECML projects. See the
presentation on BETA, Bulgaria.
In many countries, dissemination is led by the National Contact Point.
In this presentation, we can learn about the role of the
Österreichisches Sprachen-Kompetenz-Zentrum
in Austria.
This
video
describes why the ‘Pluriliteracies Teaching for Learning’ approach is
relevant for Italy and how her language teacher association, LEND, can
help raise awareness of it.
The
Qualitraining project
was rolled out nationally in Finland by the Finnish National Board for
Education, as a carefully designed project: see here for a detailed
powerpoint presentation describing how this worked.
|
Local or regional mediation
|
This case study describes the way in which the
ELP (European Language Portfolio)
was introduced at a local level. In Romania the introduction of the ELP
has been associated with curricular reform, and the Romanian project was
undertaken with the official support of the Ministry of Education as a
means of introducing the ELP at local level. The project coordinator
noted that at the end of the school year 2009–2010, all foreign language
teachers in the project school believed that the ELP was an essential
tool for language learning. Following a presentation she gave for the
teachers of French in a network of bilingual schools, the Ministry of
Education recommended that the ELP should be used in all schools in the
network, and in time it will probably be possible to promote the use of
the ELP beyond the network. The Romanian project interpreted learner
autonomy as learner independence, introducing a great variety of
activities to help learners to complete their ELP on their own. The
project also sought to develop cooperation among teachers. It used
francophone assistants to establish cultural contacts, and the school
participated in several European projects and exchanges. Learners
responded positively to the Language Biography but preferred working
with the Dossier. See Romanian ELP-WSU
case study.
This
video
describes how a teacher educator in Austria (Tyrol) plans to disseminate
the ‘Pluriliteracies Teaching for Learning’ approach.
|