Our 'Here We Come!' - project title refers to the new generation with an urgent need of foreign language skills as one of the key competences for lifelong learning and among many others a basic condition for entrepreneurship and intercultural sensitivity. We aim to focus on the early years of learning English as a second language as we consider it to play a major importance in all children's lives.
On the other hand, this is a vitally important matter from the point of view of migrants, refugees and minorities as well nowadays.
Our participating schools (England, Greece, Lithuania, Turkey) face these problems and the challenge of teaching children with different cultural backgrounds and usually with underachievement in the basic skills.
Very often schools teach among poor circumstances with a limited amount of financial support, teaching materials or visual aids. The course books available are not suitable for the different levels of knowledge pupils arrive with in these countries or for the different cultural backgrounds. At the same time the teachers are not trained well enough to face these problems and struggle with the lack of suitable means.
The goal of our project is to provide a teaching material for the teachers which is an answer for these needs with the help of the 'ININPRO' methodology (Initial Interlingual Project) the Hungarian school can provide and with the experience of bilingual language teaching the Spanish school has.
We also look forward to finding some improvements through a common way of thinking on the topic and lastly, to gain some new experiences as well as methods suitable to be used across Europe.
In the interest of sharing the innovations and strengthen the teachers' awareness a website, conferences, some seminars, several methodology courses and peer teaching lessons are planned to be organized along with a tutoring film and a methodology file and visual aids where the old and new ideas could be shared and supplemented. Both teachers and their pupils could benefit from this cooperation and we hope to further improve our practice and the quality of our teaching in this joint effort.