In our MOLAN project closing conference a couple of weeks ago someone took me by surprise. It was Day Two, all of us following the swing of the formal-PowerPoint-enhanced presentations informing us of aims, activities, and achievements that I felt swept into my childhood and teenage classes of English in a provincial town of central Spain in the early nineties. Thing is, when comparing what I was seeing and hearing with my school memories being nostalgic about the past was out of question. Three-hours three days per week and with neither the conversational method nor the task-based approach in my teachers’ mind it was the same old drudgery of grammar explanations, applied exercises in book, reading aloud, and responding in a quivering voice to a question my teacher put. I even remember lying sometimes;

for vocabulary’s sake.

Our energetic speaker in Day Two moved her arms, waved at us, did not really need a microphone, and I absolutely loved her. She was YSWYG-type; crystal clear. The project that she has been co-ordinating from 2007 up to recently, thanks to funding from the Comenius Multilateral Projects of LLP, is called ‘Broad Sweeps of Imagination’ (BSI).  Bringing together partners from Turkey, Bulgaria, Italy and Romania, BSI aims to disseminate a new teaching method to redress the widespread deficiency in communicative language teaching and usage. The main elements of the BSI method are, and I am quoting here from the guidelines book circulated during the final conference: ‘enthusiasm, teaching pronunciation, correct use of texts, clumsy pictures, dramatization, out-of-class activities, reflection files, and evaluation’. Willing to open a window to let in a breeze of creative in your classes? Having a look at the BSI method is indeed worthwhile!

Broad Sweeps of Imagination (BSI) at http://www.bsiproject.com/