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Interactive Teaching in Languages with Technology
Start date: Sep 1, 2014, End date: Aug 31, 2017 PROJECT  FINISHED 

This is a professional development project to support interactive approaches to language teaching with technology. It takes a collaborative action research approach with researchers, teachers and learners of all ages to create open educational resources to support language teachers in integrating a variety of new technologies into effective communicative and task-based language teaching. It aims to: a) involve project teachers in in-depth and ongoing collaboration and reflection on how language teaching can promote language acquisition; and b) create e-resources including technical manuals and examples of technology-mediated teaching practice, developing an online community of practice to explore and record innovative practice in language teaching using technology. This project builds on the highly successful 28-month project iTILT (interactive Technologies In Language Teaching) funded by the European Lifelong Learning Programme (KA2 Languages), focusing on the interactive whiteboard (IWB) for teaching foreign languages. The consortium of 7 educational institutions and companies produced teacher education resources (training manual and pedagogical materials), trained teachers of 6 languages in four educational sectors (primary, secondary, higher and vocational), filmed classes of 44 teachers using the IWB, and developed an open educational resource which includes over 250 video clips of IWB-mediated language teaching in 7 countries (http://itilt.eu). The iTILT project scored 9/10 in EU evaluations covering deliverables and project management. With this background, the new project builds on: a) a well-designed open educational resource whose platform meets stringent technical standards and is immediately available for extension; b) solid research results which derive from classroom contexts closely related to the classes in the new project, and c) an experienced team with complementary skills and a successful 4-year collaboration in hand. It is our belief that a project which develops and extends our existing work can further support language learners and teachers in making the most of the acquisitional opportunities offered by educational technologies. The new three year project will move beyond the IWB to focus on developing effective teaching and learning of second languages with a much wider range of new and emerging interactive technologies (such as iPads, tablet PCs, learner response systems, and videoconferencing software) both independently and in combination. The data collection/professional development cycle will include extensive teacher development involving researcher input and peer collaboration using face-to-face and online spaces, followed by two iterations of classroom filming and participant interviews. The data collected will be integrated into an extended version of the existing iTILT website, and involve new professional development e-resources for pre-service and in-service language teachers and teacher educators. The project team will use the approach developed and refined during the first project based on collaborative action research involving video stimulated reflective dialogue (VSRD) to include teacher and learner perspectives and ensure that the project is grounded in current classroom practice but also reflects the research team’s expertise in effective language teaching with technology. The data collection carried out by the partners covers three sub-programmes: tertiary education (TK, FR, DE), primary (UK, FR, DE) and secondary (BE, FR) schools. We will cover the following languages: English, French, Welsh and Turkish. The web portal, the tags, the professional development e-resource, the references to external IWB-related language and educational materials will available in English, French, German, Dutch and Turkish. We will collect data from language teachers for English, French, Turkish and Welsh.

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