Effective Use of the EPOSTL by Student Teachers of English Erasmus Project

Project Title

Effective Use of the EPOSTL by Student Teachers of English

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 higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Pedagogy and didactics; Teaching and learning of foreign languages

Project Summary

In Europe there is a special effort to improve the efficiency of education and training systems. The European Commission states that “Education and training systems need to be modernized and be more flexible in how they operate in order to provide the skills for future growth and to increase their responsiveness to labor market needs”. From this perspective teacher education plays a significant role in terms of increasing their professional competence and also to provide them with personal experience on how to develop learners’ metacognitive learning strategies as successful learners.

The “EPOSTL” stands for the material called “European Portfolio for Student Teachers of Languages”, which promotes transparency as a standard tool recognized across Europe. It has been designed as a self assessment tool for students in Foreign Language Teaching programs. It can be used as a standard self assessment tool by student teachers of foreign languages to analyse and reflect on their knowledge and skills needed to teach language. It helps them to monitor and reflect on their experiences, performance and progress during the whole course of teacher education on a purposeful material based on European standards. This project will gather foreign language teaching academics and student teachers from different institutions in Europe in order to provide a basis to share ideas and experiences on how the “EPOSTL” can be used more effectively.

The target groups of the project are; 1) academics who train foreign language teachers, 2) student teachers at foreign language teaching departments. The project will last two years. In the first year’s meeting individual and institutional experiences will be discussed, and implementations in each partner country until the next meeting will be designed. In the second year’s meeting experiences based on the implementations will be shared, obstacles and discrepancies will be discussed and a final report will be prepared as the product of the project.

The main objective of the project is to increase awareness about the importance of the self-assessment by student teachers of languages and thus to support the dissemination of the EPOSTL as a transparent tool which helps ensure that skills and qualifications of language teachers can be more easily recognized within and across national borders. Five higher education institutions from five different European countries (Turkey, Croatia, Poland, Latvia, Slovakia) took part in the project. The participant profile comprises eight students and two academics from each organization, thus a total of 50 participants attended the project events and activities.

During the project period, five transnational meetings and two IP meetings were organized. In the transnational meetings the project managers discussed the implementation activities and planned upcoming events. IP events were conducted with the participation of all project members (students and academics). They were specific platforms of exchanging information about the use of the EPOSTL in each country as well as the experience on the use of the E-EPOSTL via general and SIG meetings.

As a result of the project an E-EPOSTL was developed, a review of literature of EPOSTL was generated, some statistical analyses were administered, a project booklet was developed and all these products were disseminated via the project website at www.efueste.eu .

In the longer term, it is expected that a more effective electronic versions the EPOSTL can be developed and the use of it can be disseminated across Europe as an easily accessible, user-friendly and widely used self-assessment tool by students teachers of languages.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 208320 Eur

Project Coordinator

HACETTEPE UNIVERSITESI & Country: TR

Project Partners

• UNIWERSYTET IM. ADAMA MICKIEWICZA W POZNANIU
• LATVIJAS UNIVERSITATE
• SVEUCILISTE U RIJECI, FILOZOFSKI FAKULTET U RIJECI
• PRESOVSKA UNIVERZITA V PRESOVE