11/07/2016

Transnational meeting in Girona

We had the opportunity to meet the project group in Girona (Spain) for our second transnational meeting in October.

EOI Girona hosted the meeting in their nice institution in the beautiful city of Girona. All the partners in the project were present. As always our meetings IRL are very efficient and filled with both laughter and hard work.

The main focus was to prepare everything for Action research 2, the speaking scoresheets and the six different kind of activities for the toolbox. We also agreed on how to introduce the working process to the teachers and how to evaluate Action research 2.

Our lovely colleagues from EOI, Girona showed us their beautiful hometown and let us taste the catalan food and learn more about history and culture.

We had a guided tour around the old parts of the city. In The Town Hall we had an interesting lecture and talk with one of the politicians in Girona.

Thank you Sandra, Maite, Anna, Cristina and Elisabeth for your hospitality!






10/13/2016

Plenary talk (Alcalá de Guadaíra - Seville) - Ana Bueno

Tomorrow, Friday the 14th October, Ana, from EOI "Roquetas de Mar" (Spain) is going to give a talk about our project in the Autonomic Conference for Official Language Schools in Andalucía (Jornadas Autonómicas de Escuelas Oficiales de Idiomas de Andalucía). It will take place in Alcalá de Guadaíra (Seville).

Here you have an appetiser!


10/10/2016

Fear of speaking? We go for ‘dare to speak’



Our partner Sonja from Encora Talen in Antwerp, Belgium, reports on in-service training.

CNO, University of Antwerp

Date: 7 Oct. 2016




Carmen and I attended this in-service training hoping to get some tips and insights for the project and for our personal development as teachers - of course!

Mathea Simons and Karen Van De Putte are 2 enthusiastic secondary French teachers. Very early on in their careers they realized their students were excellent grammarians (in some cases) but did not even dare to order a waffle in a Brussels waffle stall. So they set about developing a strategy to enthuse their pupils and they came up with the workshop ‘Dare to Speak’.

French is a language that is a lot more problematic to the learner than English, e.g.  there are different sexes in  articles, adjectives and seven times more verb forms. Moreover, the attractive image of French on a  cultural, political and social level is declining.

Foreign language anxiety is a phenomenon that up to 40% of our  pupils experience. It has an enormous effect  on the strategies that learners use to acquire a foreign language. As a consequence of it, learners may limit their output to pre-learned outings and avoid difficult and personal expressions, thus missing out on opportunities to establish social relationships with native peakers.

We, the workshop participants, are given different tasks so we can try and identify the causes of the fear of speaking. Through reading  extracts  and trying to  convey their meaning in a language we do not fully master, we experience this same shyness or even fear. 

Throughout the session we are given more tasks, all designed to  make  the participants realise that speaking in small groups and pairs is less confronting and threatening than speaking in front of an audience. Furthermore, revising and repeating  the same tasks can boost a learner’s confidence.

Although students may enjoy communicating in a foreign language, they may feel threatened when listened  to and fear negative feedback when assessed. Sometimes this fear may even be stronger than other commonly known phobias.

Moreover, speaking tasks can be artificial and threatening when  imagined and acted out (going to the doctor, making a statement to the police after witnessing an accident..).

Some conclusions and tips: 
  • creating a safe and non-threatening environment is essential 
  • always connect a speaking task to pre-taught theoretical matter
  • use realistic, lifelike and motivating tasks (e.g. phoning to the station to know when a train arrives is just not done anymore, pupils use a smartphone for that)
  • gradually move from  familiar to less known or familiar communicative situations
  • use motivating feedback and evaluation strategies, focusing on the practiced structures rather than on the output as a whole
  • give your  pupils’ feedback in writing, rather than oral and make them reread it before they start working on another speaking assignment
  • perfectionist, introvert students need more encouragement (as we all know!)
  • dare to re-evaluate your own strategies and reflect on them
  • do not fear to use your native language when that is justified

At the end we get to ask (and answer) some FAQs on class management, large groups, finding materials, avoiding students learning things by heart, controlling impulsive and impetuous speakers in groups, etc.

Although most of the example activities were meant for lower level learners, I found the workshop inspiring and I will certainly use some of the ideas in my future lessons.


That’s all from Sonja

Boom, Belgium  10 Oct. 2016

6/09/2016

Thank you Christina!

Last week there was a farewell party for Christina Erenvidh, the international coordinator in the municipality of Järfälla, North of Stockholm in Sweden.

Christina has been very helpful to everyone interested in European cooperation.
She is very inspireing and an expert in applications and bureaucracy.

We wish her good luck in the future!




5/12/2016

Paul Seligson visiting EOI Girona

In April 2016 EOI Girona received the visit of Paul Seligson, author of the book English ID, published by Richmond.

The author talked to different teachers from the English Departament about the importance of being exposed to the language and using the existing knowledge of our mother tongue to help us progress in the learning of a foreign language. 

He offered two motivating workshops on how to empower our students in the learning process, how to use songs in the classroom and how to make our lessons engaging, meaningful and flexible.






Hangout of the month

Once a month we have a Google Hangout meeting with all the participants. The agenda of today was some updating of the work of each team and planning for our next Transnational meeting in Girona. Always useful to meet and see that we are heading forward!

Ana in Spain and Petra in Sweden



5/11/2016

Job Interview training

Here we can see some of the work the college students at MSS, Iceland, have been working on in English lessons with their teacher Katarzyna Pojawis.
















5/09/2016

Speaking4yourself on Twitter

We have recently started a Twitter account.

Follow us at @speaking4your!









Sweden´s most important jobs

Last week Thyra from Järfälla, Sweden run the Instagram account "The most important jobs in Sweden". It is an account for employees within the municipalities and county counsils in the whole country. The mission for Thyra was to show the everyday work of a teacher.

She took the opportunity to show the importance of speaking. Karolina from Poland and Aliki from Greece made oral exams as a part of their final test for Swedish as a second language.

You can find out more at @sverigesviktigastejobb  on Instagram.


 


Karolina was talking about body language and Aliki about the importance of setting goals in life. Very inspiring!



Involving the colleagues

All the participants in the Speaking for Yourself-project have a reflective team in their institutions. Now we are working on translating the speaking score sheets into all our languagues.

Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, French, Polish, Icelandic and Swedish coming up!



The Swedish team is working hard to find the perfect translation.


4/21/2016

Smart Marking - teacher training in Antwerp


On Wednesday 20th of April, Jeroen Masson from the University of Ghent came to Encora Talen in Antwerp to give our teachers the workshop:  “Smart Marking of Writing and Speaking Exercises”. This training was meant to arise awareness among our teachers on the importance of assessment vs. evaluation and giving feedback vs. just giving marks.

One of the questions we tried to answer in this session was: how do you provide a student with feedback on a speaking exercise and, more importantly, how do you do that with 25 students and only 50 minutes without becoming slightly nauseous?

Jeroen Masson provided us with some tricks he picked up during his teaching career, such as:
Marks are experienced as a judgement. Marks are also addictive (if positive) or demotivating (if negative). That’s why every mark we produce should have an easy to understand descriptor, which is known in advance by the students.

Other interesting insights from this workshop in the slides below:


3/03/2016

The perfect conference for us!

We have the opportunity to attend a very interesting conference at the University of Antwerp. The program couldn´t be better for us!

 Action-research in and for learner autonomy:
  • ways to materialise research in the autonomous foreign language classroom
     
  • ideas for enthusing learners to become action-researchers themselves
     
  • discussions of contemporary approaches to researching autonomy
     
  • becoming engaged in developing frameworks for classroom action-research
     
  • opportunities for interaction with researchers and practitioners in autonomy






2/04/2016

At the Ministry of Education in Madrid

Today, 4th February, the international coordinator of the project, Ana Bueno, has attended a meeting in the Ministry of Education in Madrid. It has been organized by the SEPIE with the objective of providing coordinators with guidelines to draw up the Intermediate Report that needs to be handed in before the end of the month.

They were extremely useful! And we had the chance to meet many interesting people and projects!