VIA Culture: European Cultural Heritage for Vocabulary In Action Erasmus Project

Project Title

VIA Culture: European Cultural Heritage for Vocabulary In Action

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 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Teaching and learning of foreign languages; Cultural heritage/European Year of Cultural Heritage

Project Summary

‘VIA Culture: European Cultural Heritage for Vocabulary in Action’ project’s aims are to use the wealth of the European Cultural Heritage as a vehicle for second language acquisition and simultaneously to promote European values and create a welcoming learning environment that highlights inclusiveness, security, understanding, equality, and respect among the learners. The project implements Drama in Education (DiE) and Digital Literacy (DL) in order to explore the European Cultural Heritage assets of Italy, Greece, United Kingdom and Serbia and achieve second language vocabulary acquisition.

The project has been carried out transnationally among the University of Padova in Italy, Cathays High School in the UK, International School of Belgrade in Serbia and School of Modern Greek Language in Greece. Project targets, following the second/ foreign language curricula by the Common European Framework, are a) to help learners to use the foreign language as a means of communication b) to offer them an opportunity to construct their own social and cultural identity by discovering another culture and reflecting upon the characteristics of theirs since cultural perspective allows the promotion of values such as tolerance and respect for others and c) to motivate them to explore and learn more than one foreign languages and be aware of the professional and personal benefits of foreign language learning.

VIA Culture methodology incorporates elements from well-established methodologies like Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), Task Based Language Teaching (TBLT) and Process Drama (PD). The VIA Culture project is organised around three main objectives: 1) Creation and development of educational resources for language teachers, namely an online interactive resource with all the ECH assets of the project partner countries 2) Testing and evaluation of the effectiveness of the educational resources in high school and university context 3) Consolidation and production of the final intellectual outputs.

VIA Culture aims to create as a result a novel teaching resource database and a new methodology of implementing European Cultural Heritage into second language acquisition. After the completion of the project, it is expected that fellow teachers, educators, academics and researchers to get inspired, supported and encouraged to apply VIA Culture in more languages and more countries. VIA Culture aims to communicate this novel teaching approach, through the multiplier events, published research papers, policy papers and online resources to a wide spectrum of educators across Europe and beyond.

Project Website

http://www.viaculture.org/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 138557 Eur

Project Coordinator

Cathays High School & Country: UK

Project Partners

• UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI PADOVA
• ARISTOTELIO PANEPISTIMIO THESSALONIKIS
• International School of Belgrade