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 schools 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 methodology 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, an e-dictionary, conferences, several methodology workshops, job shadowing and peer teaching lessons are planned to be organized (along with a tutoring film, a methodology file, a suggested curriculum and visual aids) where the old and new ideas could be shared and supplemented. Both teachers and their pupils can benefit from this cooperation and we plan to further improve our practice and the quality of our teaching in this joint effort. The unique transnational aspect of the program is that the method provides a common communication platform for children with different cultural backgrounds which as a result allows them to connect and accept each other more easily.
In the world of International relations knowledge of foreign languages is an important factor influencing the social life, competitiveness and employment. It is also essential to acquire the right language skills and support language learners with motivation and confidence. In order to achieve these goals, we have improved and tried out our innovative ININPRO Language Teaching Method (Initial Interlingual Programme) in six countries (England, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Spain, Turkey) with complete beginner language learners and in this way, we introduced six languages on rotation in the six participating primary schools. (A Hungarian teacher taught a Hungarian lesson in the Spanish school, Spanish teachers introduced Spanish language in the Greek school and so on.) Our language competency building programme focuses on the vocabulary that is organically built in the learners' native languages. The words involved in the method are familiar because they are used, or they sound very similar in the learners' mother tongues, so it focuses on the learners previous knowledge they had never learned but had had in their mind. Through this approach children acquire the vocabulary faster and more easily and they are more confident in using it for communication. It is not negligible in a situation where teachers have to integrate children with disadvantaged backgrounds, especially asylum seekers or migrants. The use of cognates is known and applied in modern foreign languages, but not systematically and not necessarily at the early stages of learning – thanks to our project we are able to provide a successful (tried and tested) methodology at the early stages of foreign language learning. During our two-year project we had two Transnational Project Meetings and four Language Teaching and Training Activities. Using our own budget we sent more colleagues (4 instead of 3) for more days (8 instead of 6) to each country giving more people the chance to have a deeper insight into the partner schools' everyday life and meet staff members together with experts on the field of language teaching methodology. Besides job shadowing and peer teaching, conferences were organized by the host schools and participants could take place in cultural events as well. Our project results uploaded on our website (an example Vocabulary in six languages, Methodology File, Teaching Materials, Curriculum, Tutoring films) aim to share and further develop a proven teaching method to help children learning English (or any other languages) as a second language at an early age and teachers to motivate their pupils and integrate them if necessary. As many participating organisations (universities, language schools, decision makers) were involved in the project work and our teachers took part in conferences disseminating our experiences, we do hope that this method provides an effective and integrative educational tool to enhance children’s language learning motivation and intercultural sensitivity as well and can be used in the future widely.