Teaching less widely used languages

Within the “ICT4LWUL” project (https://ict4lwult.wordpress.com/) the 6 partner institutions aimed to discover the effects of using ICT based methods in teaching less widely used languages and to create teaching recources to be used by less widely used language teachers.

In order to do so, as first step the partners shared know-how within the partnership during short term training events on how to use e-learning methods, social media and webplatforms, mobile and smartphone apps in teaching.

This phase was followed by adapting these methods to teaching the 5 target languages. Each partner developed exercises and lesson plans to be used for teaching Romanian, Italian, Estonian, Hungarian, Polish and Czech as a foreign language at A1-B1 level.

The lesson plans were afterwards tried out within pilot language lessons. Based on the feedback of teachers and students involved in pilot lessons (report available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ugt__Er8n3XvsjZJCRkzvgvqy4ub3i-J/view?usp=sharing) we can declare, that nowdays it is efficient and important to use ICT based methods in language teaching: 92,3% of respondent teachers declared that they will use developed materials during classes outside the project and they consider, that 100% of the students reacted positively for the implementation of ICT tools to the classes. On the other hand most of the students in each partner country considered that activities used during the pilot study facilitated understanding of the subject matter and 94% of the participants declared, that they would consider of using ICT-based activities during self-study.

On the other hand, the partner institutions developed a Multilingual Handbook especially for language teachers and representatives of language schools. The Handbook is being available in 7 different languages and it was meant to offer a support (ex. exercises, resources, instruments) for teachers of 6 different less widely used languages: Romanian, Hungarian, Estonian, Italian, Polish and Czech as a foreign language.

The Handbook contains 3 main chapters: an introduction section with information about the project, authors and contributors who developed the Handbook and a legend; a general description about 16 different technology-based methods targeted by the current project (e-learning methods; social media & web platforms; mobile and smartphone apps); exercises and examples for teaching the target less widely used languages as a foreign language at A1-B1 levels, together with a guide on how similar exercises can be developed by teachers/other institutions.

The Handbook is freely available for download by accessing: https://blsh.ro/sdm_downloads/download-the-ict4lwul-handbook/