BEST4LANGUAGES

Best practices for teaching languages and managing adult language schools.

(Download the Handbook here)

The “Best4Languages” Erasmus+ strategic partnership in the field of adult education was implemented between Sept. 2018 – Aug. 2020 by six partner institutions from Romania, Slovenia, Poland, Italy and Germany.

The project relied on the needs and gaps of language education institutions and managed to:

• improve the competences of the language teachers and the quality and effectiveness of language teaching practices;
• improve the competences of the language school managers about specific management issues;
• foster the quality, innovation and internationalization of language schools by their international cooperation and exchange of practices;
• improve attractiveness of language learning in Europe by making language teaching more effective and innovative.

The target group of the project consisted of language teachers and management staff involved in adult education, who took part in both international and local training events as well as dissemination activities. Partners managed to involve directly more than 120 teachers and managers within the training events of the project and 70 teachers within the dissemination activity, consisting of an online workshop.

The training events covered several interesting topics such as:

• for teachers: social media and mobile devices in the language classroom; e-learning & movie-making method for innovating language teaching; Interactive whiteboard for teaching languages and teaching intercultural competences within language classes; teaching culture within language classes; communicative approach in language teaching; digital stories in foreign language learning;
• for managers: conflict management and team-building in language schools; educational leadership in language schools; marketing strategies and opening language schools to international markets; program monitoring and reporting in language schools; human resource management in language schools; managing extracurricular services.

Besides training events, throughout the 2 years of cooperation partners also collected the best practices in the related training topics and combined them in a “Handbook of best practices” in order to help other school managers and language teachers. The findings of the two-year project are presented in this publication which covers both the aspects of the exchange: inspirational materials and exercises for a foreign language classroom (Part I: Handbook for Teachers – Exercises and learning activities) and managerial aspects (Part II: Institutional Development Strategies for Language Schools). Find out more about the Handbook by downloading it for free here: https://www.blsh.ro/proiecte/best-practices-teaching-languages-managing-adult-language-schools-best4languages-2018-2020/?lang=en

Last, but not least, the partners also created a free video-workshop about several online teaching tools they found the most useful. So if you want to know how to use Kahoot, LearningApps, Minecraft for Education, Quizizz and other similar instruments, feel free to watch our video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJooTdoYqEc&feature=youtu.be

The partnership consisted of:

Bridge Language Study House, Romania (https://www.blsh.ro)

Carl Duisberg Training Center, Germany (https://www.cdc.de)

Centrum Edukacyjne EST, Poland (http://est.edu.pl/)

Europass SRL, Italy (https://www.europassitalian.com/)

Iberika Education Group, Germany (https://www.iberika.de/)

Nista Language Center, Slovenia (https://nista.si/?lang=en)

For more info about the project you can join us on Facebook, the group will remain available after the end of the project as well: https://www.facebook.com/groups/611043099352317/