La classe en action! Echange de bonnes pratiques innovantes dans l’enseignement des langues étrangères.

"The main objective of our strategic partnership between five European schools with its major focus on the exchange of good practices in classes of foreign languages was to exchange innovative approaches by collaborating intensively in order to improve the quality of our lessons due to the implementation of innovative methods. However, our students, who could participate in an active exchange both virtually in our TwinSpace and in real life thanks to the mobilities organized at our five schools, played a decisive role. Apart from the Italian school - a professional training secondary school focusing on tourism - all participating secondary schools provide a general education. Europe seems to face some radical changes currently, which is also reflected in school: students have to be prepared for an increasingly digitalised world, but furthermore especially aspects of intercultural communication are becoming more and more important. Classes of foreign languages seem crucial to us in this context, so we wanted to focus on multilingualism (e.g. emphasis on other languages apart from English as the lingua franca) in our French project. All five partner schools of our project started with an innovative approach based on student-oriented tasks combining a practical use of information and communication technologies: an efficient use of digital whiteboards, creative work with videos, the concepts ""flipped classroom"" and ""gamification"" and interdisciplinary work linking arts and languages were the major aspects of our projet and these approaches were tested in product-oriented tasks by our students before being evaluated and finally dissiminated in our five schools by the participating teachers. Apart from the continous collaboration in our TwinSpace, we organised one mobility at every school (a combination of short-term exchange and staff training for teachers) with a group of 4 students and 2 teachers per country. During each mobility we organised a training in order to explain the host school's innvovative approach to the partner schools. The methods were tested actively and evaluated by our students in order to be implemented at our five partner schools. Questionnaires and interviews after the mobilites showed that all five approaches could contribute to an increased motivation for our students. Due to the use of information and communication technologies both students and teachers could improve their competences with regards to digital media. Moreover, our intense collaboration encouraged an improvement concerning the communicative competence of all participants (in French and English) as well as their intercultural comptence. Even though not all participants clearly improved their results in language classes at school, we definitely could observe enormous progress with regard to the development of the students' personality, cultural openness, motivation for language learning and independence. Every participating students was given a Europass documenting their experience and the competences acquired during the project.All products created throughout the project, the results of all evaluations as well as an overview of the approaches used can be found on our website and in our TwinSpace, which are available to the public, so even other European colleagues can profit from our work through eTwinning. Some of our products were published on the Project Results Platform to serve as examples. Furterhmore, every coordinator developed two didactic sequences including the five innovative approaches we worked with. These sequences are available on the PRP as well. In a webinar organised via eTwinning Live all five approaches were presented. Apart from that, our project is represented in some of the common social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram).Due to this project all participants could refelct their role as European citizens and appreciate the way of living together in a multicultural Europe full of diversity. The focus on French as the major language of the project as well as the general challenge to communicate efficiently without using their mother tongue has left a huge impact on the students, whcih will be a great advantage for them in the future."