Taking into account that English has become an international language in the whole world, all the project partners decided to make the participants aware of its importance. By working on the project products, by involving in the project activities, both students and teachers, will have the chance to improve their knowledge of English, IT and other subjects. Besides, each partner school will provide information concerning various topics in teaching English in order to attract students in the process of learning. Among the project activities, the most important ones are: ensuring the quality of education by exchanging methodology, promoting language learning and multilingual comprehension, improving the participants' knowledge and communication skills. At the same time, promoting equality for all the participants will consolidate their European identity and will develop their feeling of inclusion in community. Being a mix of primary and secondary schools, the participation at the project activities will offer, both to the beginner and advanced students, the chance to enlarge their knowledge of English. Throughout the two years, there will be various activities that will involve different kinds of participants. Thus, each partner school will be the host for courses regarding new and modern approaches of teaching English, but at the same time, there will be many final tangible products that will make the participants aware of the importance of this language, such as:competitions about the English literature or about general things concerning the partner countries, a calendar with the students' paintings, a booklet containing essays about the importance of English, a guide book with information about each partner country, a school dictionary in English and the partners' languages, presentations of schools and countries. All these results will have the purpose to make the participants learn to work as a team and develop the feeling of their belonging to the European community. The expected impact of the project will be upon students, teachers, institutions, community. The students will improve the communication skills and their understanding of Europe, improve competences in English, IT and other school subjects. The involvement of those with special needs or social problems will increase their level of self-esteem and streghten their sense of belonging to the school community. At the same time, the participant teachers will develop their pedagogical skills and methodology, will have the chance to introduce the European aspects of education in their way of teaching. They will also improve their communicative abilities and will enlarge their knowledge about other countries and educational systems. The partner institutions and the community will get aware of their own identity in the European context and will support an intercultural education.
In an increasingly globalized world and in a Europe that urgently needs cooperation and mutual understanding, learning foreign languages, in particular English as the modern lingua franca, is an essential task of general education. Unfortunately, teacher training and technical facilities for language learning are not always up to date. And even if studies like the one by John Hattie, emphasize teachers’ core importance for learning, there is a major gap between students’ motivation and the actual language competence needed. The project thus aimed at improving the professional competence of foreign language teachers in advanced and varied methods of language teaching, at encouraging teachers in general to consider English as a language used in topic-centered lessons, and at using modern (social) media for meaningful, foreign-language based communication. This originally was an entirely teacher- oriented project. Teachers were meant to experience English-based contacts in different European countries, getting to know methods and structures in different types of schools, from primary to secondary, grammar to vocational schools. In the course of the project, different methods were put forward at different schools in different countries and we meant to establish a corpus of didactic and methodic materials for general usage. From each school, there was a core team of three to five teachers who carried the bulk of the activities, inviting other colleagues, in particular non-English-teachers, to join on occasion so they could profit from English as a teaching rather than a foreign language. The project was also enhanced by letting students participate not just as recipients of modern approaches to language learning but by involving them in the conception of digital tools for teaching that involve the younger generation much more directly than us. The latter step raised some issues about privacy as digital (social) media are generally submitted to the European standard of data protection, so an open upload of results causes problems; also, the intended collection of didactic material remained extremely sketchy because of the vast range of educational settings. As a lasting result, different approaches via songs, poems, creative tasks, topic-centered teaching, school-plays, blogs and joint writing activities were applied and became tools in the hands of the teachers and classes involved. Some of these products are made available directly with the product platform, some are accessible on the project and school homepages.