I’ve been trying to integrate Twitter into my French class for quite some time now, as I am absolutely convinced of its value and still (to my great astonishment!) underdeveloped potential in language learning.

The article Twitter pour l’apprentissage des langues, published by Elisabeth Buffard on the website of the Académie d’aix-Marseille (for our readers of French), has the virtue of being clear, even for novices. She explains what Twitter is, its advantages, and its potential for the language classroom. She then proposes concrete scenarios for incorporating this medium into language classes. Her examples not only serve as food for thought, but can easily be adapted to your own teaching context.

E. Buffard also reminds us of Twitter’s potential for teacher training (lifelong learning).

For the author of this article, Twitter promotes the learner’s autonomy and represents a “learning booster” as part of a virtual toolkit that plays a role in the autonomous and social learning in which the learner is the main actor and user.

This article is an absolute must-read! http://www.anglais.ac-aix-marseille.fr/spip/spip.php?article470

If you have other examples of how to integrate Twitter in the language classroom, I would be very grateful if you would share your experience with us by posting a comment. Thank you!

The Language Teaching Centre (SprachLehrInstitut – SLI) in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau will hold a conference from September 28 – 30, 2011 entitled “Multilingualism in Society, the World of Work, and Politics. New Challenges for Teaching at Institutes of Higher Education/Universities”

This year, the discussion concerning multilingualism is to focus on the areas of “the economy”, “the employment market” and “integration”.

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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; Read More

Dr Giovanna Tassinari teaches Italian at the Language Centre of the Freie Universität Berlin. She is the head of the Independant Language Learning Centre and is the author of the case study “Tandem programme at the Language centre of the FUB“. She published in 2010  Autonomes Fremdsprachlernen, Peter Lang Verlag.  As a specialist of learner autonomy, she agreed to participate to this forum and sent us this article. More are to come. Thank you, Giovanna !

Promoting learner autonomy in the classroom: a motivating experience both for teachers and learners

Learner autonomy is the buzz word of the moment. It’s considered to be one of the musts in language learning and teaching nowadays. It’s a prerequisite for life-long learning; it increases motivation; it contributes to individual development and increased social interaction, to critical thinking and much, much more. But what exactly is learner autonomy in the classroom? How do you implement it? Have you ever tried to foster it in your own classroom? Was it successful, effective? How do you feel about this?

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A very interesting article for our readers who can understand French is available on the website of the Agence nationale des usages des TICE. The article addresses the issue of learning with serious games – video games combining learning with entertainment. The impact of using serious games for learning a foreign language has been illustrated by Mark Peterson, professor of Linguistics at the University of Kyoto.

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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

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.

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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. Read More

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.

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(Part I was published on 28 July)

Managerial and intercultural skills

Doing business with Latin America has a project based approach. It fosters integration between content and language, but involves the learning of skills as well. Moreover, depending on the stress that is put on the economic context or the cultural component, these skills can be defined as managerial and intercultural.
First of all, students should apply knowledge from diverse disciplines in order to solve multidisciplinary problems. A good simulation of real practice, where managers are supposed to accept responsibilities and to combine different layers of information, going from facts and figures to a wide range of human interest topics. Read More