The European Commission offers grants for courses listed in their Comenius/Grundtvig course database, covering course fee, travel & subsistence. With the application deadline of 14 January approaching rapidly, we would like to draw your attention to some courses the non-profit organization Let’s Learn IT has to offer.

eTwinning, the community for schools in Europe is part of Comenius, the EU programme for schools.

It has more than 117.000 active members and more than 4200 active projects.

This article highlights the eTwinning Groups: online groups already active are:

• Creative Classroom
• Social Inclusion
• Maths & Science
  Read More

Did we ever have doubts about it?

Some of you may already know how much I am in favour of using online learning communities and Web 2.0 tools to empower language learning and learners’ motivation.  So, imagine my enthusiasm to have the opportunity to spread the Word and announce the publication of the Pedagogical Innovation in New Learning Communities report!

You dreamed about it, Richard Byrne made it!

Many of us are willing to create videos for language class projects, but until recently, it always seemed difficult to handle with all the aspects of this type of project: where can free public access images and sounds be found? How to deal with mixing tools? Where can tools for screen-casting be found?  The whole process seemed to require many different skills reserved to the “happy few” teachers who had contacts in the field of media.

A recent participation in the selection board for mobility grants at higher education institution level once again revealed that students with apparently good prospects for an exchange scholarship lose out on positions in the final admission shortlist because of their weak and sometimes inappropriate letter of motivation.

For this reason I would like to encourage language teachers to dedicate some of their teaching time  to explain to their students how to write a letter of motivation. The number of students who want to study abroad for a period of time with or without mobility grants is increasing. They surely would be grateful if, during their L2 or L3 lessons, they could acquire and deepen skills that can be concretely used already during the study period, such as how to write a well-structured and convincing letter of motivation.

In a month’s time the International House London, an established language school with over fifty years of experience in providing language courses and teacher training programmes, will be holding its fourth Modern Languages Teachers’ Conference. Their spacious and fully-equipped campus near Covent Garden welcomes you on Friday 12 and Saturday 13 November to discuss the teaching of languages for business purposes and the usage of technology in the classroom –£50 for the two days. Friday’s talks, delivered in English, vary from sessions on technology in the language classroom and tips on how to cope with students unwilling to cooperate in communicative learning classes, to neuro-linguistic programming techniques to boost language learners’ confidence. Saturday’s workshops, delivered in the delegates’ target language, focus on Arabic, French, Italian and Spanish language teaching.

Here is Handbook of Good Practice!

The Centre for Excellence in Multimedia Language Learning (CEMLL) at the University of Ulster has at your disposal its Handbook of Good Practice, which comprises ten innovative activities using digital technology that have been developed to promote active engagement of students and tutors in the learning and teaching of languages. The examples are generic in nature and include the following listening, reading, speaking, and writing exercises:

Annotating a TV advertisement

Creating and conducting a survey

In 2006, two Erasmus students came up with an idea: to virtually promote European study and work offers based on former study experience. The idea of WISHES was born.

Today, the WISHES-project pursues an even wider mission: co-financed by the European Commission (Erasmus Mundus) its mission is to enhance the attractiveness of the European Higher Education Area and to promote the best fit between trainees, European higher education institutions (HEIs) and enterprises.

To fulfill this mission, the partners:

• Set up and operate the WISHES mobility portal as an effective networking and intelligent recruitment tool
• Organize WISHES Networking Days to sustainably initiate further cooperation in the European higher education area supported by IC

Vía rápida (fast track) is the new textbook of Spanish on which the publisher Difusión, specialized in the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language, wants to bet. And I’ll take those odds; a well-structured and sleek book of fifteen units attempting to encompass linguistic varieties and historical and cultural landmarks of the Spanish-speaking world, Vía rápida covers A1/A2/B1 according to the CEFR all in one!

Ideal for adult absolute beginners during an academic year, Vía rápida results from the constructive work by a team of professionals from various institutions, such as the Freie Universität Berlin and Potsdam Universität, who upon reflection on their students’ necessities have filled a much needed space for tutors teaching Spanish to university students, though not exclusively. Serving as a referential text for those wishing to brush up efficiently on their Spanish through self-assessment exercises and the design of a portfolio, Vía rápida also enhances independent learning and prepares students to sit the Certificate of Spanish at an initial level (DELE inicial).

Can autonomous language learning foster language learning motivation? The title of this post, quoted from the case study “The implementation of EPOS, a Web-Based Learning-Platform for the ELC-ELP and other Validated ELP-Version within a Tutorial Programme in Combination with Language Courses at the University of Bremen” written by Bärbel Kühn, Astrid Buschmann-Göbels and Rüdiger Fehse, is an affirmative answer to the initial question.