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S'APPUYER SUR L'ENSEIGNEMENT DE LA LANGUE ETRANGERE POUR REUSSIR.
Start date: Jun 1, 2015, End date: May 31, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Our main goal is the improvement of the school results and this not only for our school but for the surroundings schools as well. Our school belongs to a rural area with a decreasing population. Our pupils are from low social environment, quite isolated. The records of our pupils are among the weakest of Brittany. The teachers’ team thinks it is mostly due to a lack of cultural opening with, as consequences, a lesser motivation regarding the learning. To start a learning process, pupils definitely need to open their minds on the world around them. To open the pupils’ minds we have chosen to develop their European spirit. We do the bet that increasing the feeling of European citizenship will trigger a better motivation for learning. They will learn more because of the feeling to belong to a community larger than their immediate surroundings. They will learn more because Europe needs them and their culture as well as they need Europe to develop. To develop our pupils' European citizenship , our school want to improve the way we teach foreign language. We want to teach English as it is actually spoken par English people and by a large part of the international community. We are already through this process but we want to improve it much more. Our teachers need a new training to achieve this goal. Our school has an innovative way of teaching English. Far beyond the weekly hour and a half of specific English lessons for pupils from 6 to 11 years old, some other times using English as the language of communication have been settled. Not only pupils must understand what the teachers tell them but they must as well speak in English. These are complexes learning situations based on real communication with real issues (obtain what you ask for), the pupils needing to take a risk (of making mistakes when they express themselves in a foreign language), the pupils needing an open mind also (to accept the mistakes, to accept to change even the prosody of their sentences), the pupils needing at last a complex thinking (linking together their acquired knowledge to build new language structures). All these skills are mandatory in the process of learning. These non specific times using English as the communication language are informal times (rituals, different requests from the pupils) or other subjects’ times (sport, plastic arts, grammar…). They have proved themselves efficient to develop skills in English and to improve the learning motivation. So we want to develop them and let them become a strong part of our school identity. To achieve that goal, we need a linguistic and pedagogical training. We definitely need to improve our skills in English language to get more opportunities to use it in our classes. It will also enable us to teach an updated English more easily usable by our students during any communication situations (with correspondents, with the many British who came live in our village, or much more simply on the net etc.). Teachers' training is also necessary to improve efficiency when teaching the A1 level of the CECR. We need to rethink the way we teach in a way to use more English language structures useful to A1 linguistic learning. At last, we need to be trained to improved links between specific English lessons and other English times: how do we use the first ones to enforce the others ones efficiently? There are only 3 teachers in our school. One of them is enough to get the training and spread it to the others. With the inspection’s help, he will be in measure to transmit the acquired skills to surrounding schools, given that there are already regular meetings between primary and secondary teachers regarding English teaching. The participant is the school's headmaster. He is a former pedagogical advisor. His English is good but must be deepened and updated. His good knowledge of pedagogy is a key to rich meetings with foreign teachers. This will allows him to find new ways to teach English during informal school’s times. After the formation, the participant will train the teachers on pragmatic linguistic skills in order to use English in every class, even when the teacher is not fluent in English. The school's team will prepare a list of possible situations of communication in English during school time. They will also develop the tools to transform the linguistic knowledges acquired by impregnation in more structured skills of the English language. Finally, the teachers will build on this method of learning combining complex situations and specific structuring situations a way to develop a culture of success and of mind opening. The expected success in the practice of foreign language will pave the way to success in the other disciplines in showing students that to open your mind and become actor of your learning is effective.

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