eTwinning and Language Learning

	Find out how eTwinning helped two teachers in Belgium and Italy find an interesting way to teach languages in natural and enjoyable way

Ria de Wilde, Belgium, and Marina Marino, Italy, are both teachers of French as a second language and they both integrate eTwinning into their lessons. At the moment, they work together on two eTwinning projects:

• L’école idéale dans l´Europe de demain
• Planète @dos

These projects aim to establish links between Belgian and Italian secondary school students and help them use a foreign language in an authentic situation. To do so, they make intensive use of tools such as wikis, podcasting and blogs and use the TwinSpace to collect and regroup all material and links connected to the projects.

INTERVIEW

Let’s meet these two enthusiastic teachers and learn about their approach to eTwinning. Below is an interview with Ria, and on the eTwinning Teachers’ Blog (in French) you can read more about Marina’s approach to eTwinning.

How did you meet? How did you know that the other was the right partner?
Marina and I met at the eTwinning conference in Linz in 2006. We talked a lot, so I knew that we had students of the same age and a similar approach to ICT projects. In Linz, we exchanged our email addresses and some information about our schools. After the conference, I contacted Marina and asked her if she was still interested and if she wanted to start a project with me. She is a very enthusiastic person and so the cooperation has worked very well from the very beginning.

How did you manage to agree on the topics of your projects and on the way you are going to carry them out?
We communicate by Skype on a regular basis, at least a couple of times a week. Sometimes, I propose a topic, sometimes Marina does. We try to work together on items that we normally work on alone in our classrooms. eTwinning creates interaction so that the students can discover more aspects about the chosen topic.  

You had already carried out other eTwinning projects before you started working together. Do you have a feeling that your projects improve? What did you learn from your eTwinning experience?
There is certainly an evolution in our eTwinning projects. In the beginning, they were mainly based on an exchange of information. The students in each country described what was going on in their own country, and the partners could just read the information but they did not do anything with it. Little by little, we saw that pedagogically it was more interesting to provide more interaction and we looked for activities where the students could work together.

Your projects are based on intensive use of ICT tools, such as blogs, wikis or podcasting. What are the reasons to this? How do they help you teach a foreign language?
When students study a foreign language they have to learn vocabulary and grammar. But that is not the only thing. To practice and to improve their competences – reading, writing, speaking and listening – teachers can use ICT tools which enable oral and written communication. Students have to communicate in a real situation with other Europeans and so they cannot use their mother tongue.

How does the fact that you work with a class abroad change your lessons?
The lessons become more dynamic. The experience of real communication is very positive for everyone: teachers and students. Sometimes, we as teachers underestimate the role we play in young people’s lives. We have the ability to open up their minds to think as Europeans!

Did an eTwinning experience help you in other school projects? How?
In our school, we want to start a Comenius project called “The Quest for the European Grail”. We will go for a game approach in order to motivate our students.  The main reason to start such a project is that we want to extend international cooperation and involve more teachers and students in European partnerships. Teamwork will be very important, not only within the school but also among the partners from Poland, Norway and Bulgaria. We met each other in various eTwinning Professional Development Workshops and at the eTwinning conference in Linz in 2006. We will use our eTwinning experience, mainly as far as the tools are concerned as we want to reuse wikis and podcasting software. We will also register our project in eTwinning and use the tools on its platform.

What do your pupils think about eTwinning?
Students like to learn this way. They do not feel like they have to work very hard; however, they are busy all the time and they use the foreign language in a natural way. They improve their language competences and their ICT skills.

Just a hypothetical question – what would you miss the most if you could not use eTwinning in your lessons any longer?
I think teaching would be boring for me. I can no longer imagine what my teaching would be without eTwinning. Now, the eTwinning project is the most important part of my lessons. It is a great challenge to work together with another European teacher and to come up with new ways of teaching foreign languages. So I would miss these contacts and these impulses in my every day work.

	Web-editori:	Christina Crawley

	Julkaistu :	21/05/2007

	Viimeksi muokattu :	30/05/2007

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