Instead of drawing your attention to an interesting article or study today, I would like to invite you all to a seminar devoted to CLIL in primary and secondary education. This seminar will be held on 28^th April, in the Verlooyzaal, Oudstrijderslaan 200, 1140 Brussel-Evere. Schools and other people interested in CLIL, how it really works and how to implement it, are more then welcome to come. Read More

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

(Interview Part III)

Q: What are the success factors of internationalisation for your school?
A: The Tilff-project with Germany and Switzerland is a self-sponsored project. Costs are kept relatively low since we are self-catering. Therefore we don’t need to pay any external staff. All costs are divided among the participants. For this project no EU-sponsorship seems to be possible, although we keep on searching for the appropriate fundraising programmes. Our Comenius school partnership has been fully sponsored by EPOS, our national agency, covering all travel and accommodation costs. It goes without saying that all international projects together cost money: printing costs, ICT-equipment, promotional gifts, catering, travel costs etc., so clear and full support of the school management is an absolute necessity.

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Q: What initiative is your school most proud of??
A: It’s difficult to say: the Comenius school partnership has been a fantastic experience for our teachers and to a smaller extent to our pupils but definitely the Euroclass Project in Tilff is a more personal achievement, since we managed to adapt the original European Classes idea into our own situation and to our specific needs. For our pupils of technical education we made the framework less strict and more inviting to be creative in expressing their ideas, in presenting their own presentation work. All this reflects in the willingness to speak with new people, in a foreign language most pupils had so far only be using within classroom walls.

Q: How do pupils participate in the organisation? Read More

A stimulating example of how secondary schools motivate pupils to learn and practice languages is the Miniemeninstituut (MI), a technical and vocational school in Leuven, Belgium.
MOLAN interviewed Kris Florquin, the school’s Headmaster and Dirk Staf, European Coordinator.

Q: Kris, when exactly did your school decide to move into internationalisation? And what was the underlying policy?
A: 2005 was the year in which two of my teachers Diederik Roelandts and Dirk Staf took part in the European Classes Project in Alden Biesen, organized by the Flemish ministry of education and supported by the Flemish Community. The project idea is to communicate in at least two foreign languages on a broad EU-linked topic elaborated by the pupils. For us it was a good opportunity to broaden our network of contacts with other schools in order to get new Read More

You will find case studies on Study Trips on the MOLAN website

Two of these CS are perfect examples of a real partnership between secondary schools. I’d like to introduce them to you:

Friedrich-Ebert-Oberschule Berlin (Germany)

What is it about? A partnership (exchange programme for teachers and students) between a secondary school in Berlin (Germany) and a comprehensive school in Santiago de Atitlán (Guatemala), destroyed by a natural disaster (landslide) in October 2005.
This project was launched by two university students (Freie Universität Berlin) who were looking for a school contact in order to carry out a humanitarian aid initiative.
Languages covered: Spanish and … (to a very small degree) indigenous Maya languages. Read More