SpeakER Erasmus Project

Project Title

SpeakER

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Teaching and learning of foreign languages; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills

Project Summary

Multilingualism has been identified as playing a key role in fostering mobility and linguistic diversity in the EU by the European Commission’s article “About multilingualism policy” and the Council Recommendation on Key competences for Lifelong Learning. Language learning is therefore one of the top educational priorities in the EU, calling for innovative, inclusive and multilingual teaching methods allowing for students to speak two additional languages to their mother tongue.
Language learning is a discipline that calls for regular practice and immersion in order to develop the four main language skills, namely: reading, listening, writing, and speaking. Language teachers are always on the lookout for innovative activities allowing them to work on those skills with their students.
In the past few years, Escape Rooms (ER) have generated a growing interest among teachers as they are indeed engaging and immersive. Nevertheless, the existing solutions are often expensive, only in digital format, or do not fit the needs of teachers in terms of quality and/or accessibility. In order to really help teachers, this project will provide ready-made content as well as practical advice on how to implement such activities in the classroom for language learning.
The goal of this project is to foster multilingualism and diversity in the EU by promoting good practices to implement ER in language courses. These games will consist of a scenario in which the students will develop their reading, writing, listening and speaking skills in the foreign language by solving language riddles, decoding written and audio messages, communicating in the target language and exploring an environment filled with challenges and clues in order to escape a room.
Our project’s approach is to guide language teachers and equip them with the knowledge and tools related to the creation of Escape Rooms. By using ER, we are creating a scenario in which students will be surrounded by elements allowing them to practice the target language. The experience will therefore be totally immersive. To create engagement, the students will have a motivating goal: to escape the room in which they have been locked, to open a chest, or to save the classroom, by working together and solving riddles.
In addition to the four main necessary skills to practice a foreign language, two other aspects are important to include in this project:
The first is cultural heritage. As a language always reflects a community’s way of thinking and culture, it remains essential to teach students about the culture behind the language they are learning. With Escape Rooms, this can easily be integrated in the scenarios by choosing relevant figures as characters and by creating an environment that is true to the cultural reality.
The second is the development of language teachers’ digital skills. The project will train them on the use of different resources in order to understand why and how to practically implement the use of ER in their language courses. Among those resources, some ICT tools will be recommended and tested by the partners, such as QR codes, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Voice Recognition, etc.

The intellectual outputs developed in this project will be:

• A booklet “ER and languages: a perfect match?”
• A creation box with tools, resources and inspirations
• A collection of 300 enigmas
• A guide “Animation of a pedagogical ER for language education”
• The creation of 50 ER scenarios

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 280512 Eur

Project Coordinator

YuzuPulse & Country: FR

Project Partners

• Regional Directorate of Primary and Secondary Education of Western Macedonia
• Srednja skola za informacione tehnologije
• SCS LogoPsyCom
• Colegiul National “Doamna Stanca”
• Babel Idioma y Cultura S.L.