Newsletter nº 3 – August 2023

sep 4, 2023 | Newsletter

Dear teachers, teacher trainers and researchers,

TEMPLATE has come to its end and we would like to say goodbye with our last Summer Newsletter.

Here you will find a summary of all the work the TEMPLATE team has been doing in the last year.

Don't forget TEMPLATE is still up and running on our website https://templateplurilingualism.eu/ where you will find loads of materials and information for your teaching and training.

It has been a pleasure to share all these experiences with you,

TEMPLATE Team.
Newsletter nº 3 - August 2023
II MULTIPLIER EVENT - BELGIUM
TEMPLATE’s second Transnational Meeting and Multiplier event took place at the beginning of November 2022 in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium).


The TEMPLATE team had the opportunity to meet again for three days to reflect on the work done and plan the next steps in the project.

Moreover, 35 teachers, who shared their interest in plurilingualism, attended our multiplier event and had the chance to exchange opinions and experiences while creating some plurilingual and CLIL tasks.
REGIONAL SEMINARS

GERMANY, LITHUANIA, SPAIN and ITALY celebrate their Regional Seminars.
130 language and CLIL teachers have attended regional seminars organised by TEMPLATE in the last year. They learnt, put their knowledge into practice and shared insights with other teachers regarding digital technology, plurilingualism and CLIL. One more time TEMPLATE puts teachers together to help them reflect on their teaching.

WEBINARS

TEMPLATE provides teachers with three webinars on Plurilingual CALL, Telecollaboration, and CLIL.
TEMPLATE has carried out three webinars focused on the three main pillars of the project: CALL, CLIL and Telecollaboration. 25 teachers could attend these webinars where, after a theoretical explanation of the main concepts of the session was given, they had the opportunity to meet teachers from other countries to work together on real case studies and their application in the classrooms.

Some teachers shared with us their opinions about the webinars:

"I really enjoyed the talks with other teachers, comparing the different school systems."
"It was an enriching meeting and the second part (the practical one) was very stimulating.”
I like the fact that the activities proposed were multimodal (with the use of visuals, written texts, etc.) and the software employed is available in both Windows and iOS”
FINAL EVENT
Università degli studi di Torino hosted the final event of our project at the end of May 2023. Teachers from the five countries in the consortium accompanied us and had the opportunity to share experiences with other teachers.
We had the pleasure to have Ana Llinares (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Sandra Garbarino (Università di Torino) and Simone Bregni (Spring Hill College) as our Keynote speakers. They talked to us about literacy pedagogy and assessment in CLIL, intercomprehension and video game-based foreign language learning.
You can see their presentations and brief summary given by each speaker on our website.

Students also had their space in our event! Students and teachers from MAUX presented several plurilingual activities that they had carried out in class. It was great to see our students in action.
Several workshops were prepared for the afternoon. One of them, covering the CLIL component of our project, was introduced by our Spanish teachers Maria Marco and Héctor Ramírez, who told us about their experience in TEMPLATE and the implementation of plurilingual tasks in CLIL classes both in primary and secondary school.
The workshop on CALL, presented by our Belgian colleagues Fanny Meunier and Remy Decorte (UCLouvain), helped teachers to develop competencies for implementing pluralistic approaches in the classroom. The workshop focused on the implementation of four different pluralistic approaches in MFLanguage subject teaching.
Last but not least, our German partners Hilal Şahin and Andrea Kratzer were in charge of the Telecollaboration workshop. They showed teachers how to develop digital and pedagogical competencies to design and implement plurilingual-inspired telecollaboration for their learners.
OUR WEBSITE
New resources and materials have been added onto our website.

We will keep sharing useful resources with you, so visit our website (https://templateplurilingualism.eu/) and check our interactive books in the resources section with lots of ideas and activities; all the hands-on material we have prepared for you, ready-to-use activities that you can start implementing in your classes today; take a look at the videos and presentations of our speakers in the final event; you also have a theoretical framework in the format of an interactive book which is worth flicking through if you want to know more about plurilingualism, CLIL, CALL, Telecollaboration and the use of digital tools; and if you are a teacher trainer, there's material for you too, don't forget to watch our videos with results commented by our partners, and our manual for webinars!

You can always check our youtube channel for our digital tools bank, or to watch all the videos we have posted on the website.
DISSEMINATION
The TEMPLATE team has been presenting the project in several events this year. Here are some of them!
EUROCALL 2022
Presented by Giulia Ciaramita (Universitat Jaume I/Unito)
Pre-service Teacher Education and the Integration of Mediation, Technology and Plurilingualism.
EUROCALL 2022
Presented by Euline Cutrim Schmid and Anita Cvetkovic Kienle (Pädagogische Hochschule Schwäbisch Gmünd)
Challenging the Monolingual Bias in Telecollaboration: Intermediate Findings of the European Project TEMPLATE.
AELFE 2022
Presented by Giulia Ciaramita (Universitat Jaume I/Unito)
The integration of mediation, plurilingual and digital competences in language learning tasks.

E-GRAPHELES 2022
Presented by Carmen Notari (Universitat Jaume I)
Actitudes, usos y necesidades tecnológicas de nuestros docentes de lenguas. Proyecto TEMPLATE.

AESLA 2023
Presented by Giulia Ciaramita (Universitat Jaume I/Unito) and Inmaculada Fortanet (Universitat Jaume I)
Multimodality as a mediation strategy in foreign language textbooks.

ICC 2023
Presented by Anita Cvetkovic (University of Education Schwäbisch Gmünd) and Carmen Notari (Universitat Jaume I)
The TEMPLATE EU project: Teachers’ reflections and attitudes about a webinar-based training experience on plurilingual language learning and teaching.

DILLE 2023
Presented by Giulia Ciaramita (Universitat Jaume I/Unito)
La formazione alla mediazione nella scuola secondaria.
MEET OUR TEACHERS
In this Newsletter, meet some of the teachers who have participated in our project

Hallo an alle! My name is Andrea Kratzer and I am a TEFL teacher from Germany. Languages have always played a very important role in my personal and professional life - je suis aussi une professeur de français. The use and integration of digital technologies in the classroom has become equally important to me, which is why I loved the idea of participating in TEMPLATE. After taking part in the training offered by TEMPLATE, I carried out two plurilingual-inspired virtual exchange projects, one in class 4 (primary school: Germany - Spain) and one in class 7 (secondary school: Germany - Italy). Although it is time-consuming to prepare a virtual exchange, I found that the project had many positive effects on my learners and myself. Not only did they realise that English can be used to communicate with peers from all over the world, but they also improved their speaking, writing, listening and intercultural skills. I was thrilled to see some of them become less shy and more confident in participating in English lessons. I became aware that I can use more than 'just' English in my language classes. I enjoyed getting to know other teachers from abroad and learning more about how they teach. I am very happy to have taken part in TEMPLATE. Thank you for this opportunity. Tschüss!
Andrea
“Early 2021, one of my former lecturers at the UCLouvain invited me to take part in a European project promoting plurilingualism and technology in the language lesson. Teaching English and German since 2015 at Institut Sainte-Ursule in Forest, Brussels, I was immediately curious about the plurilingual part and interested in integrating more technology in my daily teaching. I embarked on the TEMPLATE project and trained via webinars, before trying the suggested activities in my classes. This also gathered us in May 2023 in Turin for a conference day and collaborative workshops, where we could exchange with our European colleagues. Participating in this has allowed me to make the digital shift in my lessons with confidence and specific learning objectives. It has also strengthened my attention to developing the plurilingual competence of my students, which is encouraged by the CEFR.”
Thibaut
“In February 2022, I was invited by Galilée College (ISPG Brussels) to participate in a training session led by Fanny Meunier and Remy Decorte on plurilingual approaches and the use of new technologies in language pedagogy. It was the first time I had received training on these topics, and I immediately wanted to learn more. Therefore, I sought to apply certain methods in the classroom. As a teacher of Germanic languages in Brussels and Ghent, it was relevant to my teaching practice.
A few weeks later, I was invited to attend the international convention in Turin. It was during this convention that I was able to learn a lot more about the Template project. The presentations and workshops were in line with the project: full of resources.
I particularly appreciated the "short-term feasibility" of some projects. For example, we received lists of digital tools for organizing language exchanges facilitated by technology. This was demonstrated through the experience of a class that came to testify about the success and challenges of this method. Of course, many other topics were discussed during the convention, further strengthening my interest in the project.”
Tawfik
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