Approaches to language acquisition for adult students Erasmus Project

Project Title

Approaches to language acquisition for adult students

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 adult education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Pedagogy and didactics; Teaching and learning of foreign languages; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills

Project Summary

Communication in foreign languages is one of the eight key competencies defined by the European Reference Framework. It consists in the ability to understand spoken messages, to initiate, sustain and conclude conversations and to read, understand and produce texts appropriate to one’s individual needs. A positive attitude involves the appreciation of cultural diversity and an interest in and curiosity about languages and intercultural communication. Language teaching and learning is essential to ensuring that European citizens can move, work and learn freely throughout Europe. This will help boost jobs and growth, and contribute to a mutual understanding of other countries and cultures. It is also essential to ensure that language deficiencies are not a barrier to participation in society. The role of the European Commission is to coordinate efforts with national governments to pursue the objectives of the strategic framework for languages with support from the activities of Erasmus+.

The main objective of the project is to contribute to the provision of the quality and effective teaching methods and tools for education providers – teachers and trainers. In order to achieve the main objective, the project activities will focus at:
– fostering of the awareness of importance of speaking foreign languages in the globalizing society;
– improvement of the access to the quality innovative and effective teaching and training tools and methods for teaching foreign languages to adult learners;
– sharing and evaluation of various approaches to teaching English to adults;
– providing a simple comparative analysis of the collected approaches focused on their benefits and feasibility;
– promotion of the life-long learning, especially in relation to the importance of multilingualism.

The project will be implemented in a rather big partnership consisting of 10 different partners from 10 different European countries. The size of the partnership is expected to have a significant multiplying effect on the spreading of the project results.

This project will address two distinct target groups:
– adult learners; this group needs special approaches in comparison to those being used in formal education at schools (in terms of fostering their awareness of their own skills and potential for learning foreign languages);
– educators (teachers and trainers); this target group needs to keep pace with the development of technology as well as with the increased demand for the quality education, that should be tailored to the requirements of the first target group in order to fulfill the above mentioned need.

The methodology of the project is based entirely on the sharing: sharing of expertise as well as sharing of newly gained experience. During the first phase the partnership will work on the selection of the methods and problem areas in the language teaching. The second phase will be dedicated to the actual application, training and sharing. The partners will share their expertise they have in the language teaching; they will focus on finding the most innovative and effective methods that may help to overcome the most important problem areas in the language teaching with the maximum added value for the learning effect of the learners. The partners will also choose one or more methods that they will intend to implement into their classes. After testing and evaluating of the chosen approaches in their organizations, the partners will share the experience and demonstrate the approach and lessons learned. Finally, the last phase will be focused at final evaluation of the selected approaches and their processing into a practical toolkit. The methods will be presented in a formalized form as a printable publication.

The project will produce various results, starting from the tangible products (a toolkit of recommended innovative teaching methods suitable for teaching foreign languages and their comparative analysis) to specific outputs (improvement of the teaching skills of the involved teachers, increase of the awareness of the importance of multilingualism in the EU and creation of a new network of partners) and outcomes
(improvement of the efficacy of the newly trained teachers in their language lessons, improvement of the training offer of the participating partners and possible involvement in further projects within the new network of partners), resulting in certain impacts (improvement of the learning results of the learners in the language classes of the project partners, improvement of the overall quality of the language teaching in the partner organizations and thus their reputation, improvement of the overall potential of involvement in other international projects).

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 125745 Eur

Project Coordinator

ProEduca z.s. & Country: CZ

Project Partners

• GECKO PROGRAMMES LIMITED
• DANCE CLUB 7/8B HASKOVO SDRUZHENIE
• Internationella Kvinnoföreningen
• Learning for Integration ry
• WYZSZA SZKOLA BIZNESU I NAUK O ZDROWIU
• Welcome Home International
• Asociatia pentru Tineret “Emil Racovita 2000”