The BOOST Project (Building Open Online Series for Teaching) aims to improve the digital readiness of teachers of English as a foreign language to students aged 8 -14 by providing an open-access series of engaging native-speaker content videos linked with a Resource Pack of ready-made activities to stimulate production of the language in online learning. The objective is to enable teachers to use this content and accompanying teacher training guidebook and procedures in their online lesson delivery, and learn to adapt the process and create their own materials, and develop and share the ideas from the project with peers; to help teachers to develop students’ communicative competency in English in the target regions. The project recognises the importance of online, blended, and hybrid education in the current context and the gap in resources with accompanying guides and training currently available to teachers. The project aims to create a teacher-pack, suitable to teachers of all levels of technical competency, to boost their preparedness to use digital resources to accelerate their students’ progress and improve their accuracy and ability in the communicative skills. The content will feature native-speaker audio in a variety of dialects and accents and activities will be designed by pedagogic experts to form part of a communicative online or blended lesson and stimulate students' verbal production of language. BOOST will be carried out by three participating language schools, in Czech Republic, United Kingdom and Ireland, who are building on an existing series of collaborations around the area of training of English teachers of young learners. The partners will prepare two intellectual outputs, one focusing on a Teacher's Resource Packs for digital education for levels A0, A1, A2, B1 according to CEFR and the second on production of the Open Online Series of Videos. Within the overall structure of those two outputs, the partners have developed an activity plan that focuses on phased project exeuction along established lines of expert content development within a project of this scope. The project partners will initially research and prepare the optimum content delivery style and format, and then reach participating schools in the target group with a pilot programme of initial representative content. This will involve teachers from at least 9 schools teaching pupils at different CEFR levels from A0 to B1 at age 8 - 14; and the teachers will be engaged to act as conduits for the success of the pilot content. From this pilot, the partners will be able to analyse results and optimise the content to ensure maximum engagement for the target group students. The project outputs will be shared in the partner countries in addition to Italy, Spain and Austria via multiplier training events, enabling teachers to implement and adapt the content. It is in this way, the project aims to kickstart the usage of engaging native-speaker content in classrooms where there is limited access to interactions with native speakers by enabling English teachers reached by the project to take leadership and mentoring roles within their institutions and support and develop their peers in the use and adaptation of the content; and provide opportunities for more teachers to strengthen communicative teaching skills in this context. Furthermore, the easy-to-use nature of the content will be a natural entry point for teachers low in training in the use of digital resources, which, as our research is shown is the norm, and open doors for further use of digital media to engage and stimulate students in English language classrooms.
The main objective was to enhance English language education and support English language teachers and learners worldwide not only during distant learning. The BOOST project provides practical resources and engaging activities to empower teachers digital readiness and skills and to foster the development of students' speaking abilities by providing free, easy and age appropriate access to engaging native-speaker content. By curating a comprehensive collection of teaching materials suitable for 8 to 14-year-olds, BOOST project offers teachers valuable tools that can be seamlessly integrated into their classrooms both online and offline, serving as supplementary digital material to any textbook. The project's ultimate objective is to revolutionize English language education by enabling teachers to provide the best possible learning experience for their students and to encourage effective communication skills in a multicultural and interconnected world.
During pandemic teachers were facing a number of challenges. One of these challenges was finding useful teaching resources online. There were not many free resources available, and it was time consuming to create their own resources from scratch, or not age-appropriate, or all too theoretical. HLC was runing about 50 courses for young learners at that time and noticed, how empty-handed the teachers felt. The under-14 age group was perceived as the most difficult for several reasons. Low level of English, requiring age and level appropriate materials, problems with concentration and motivation. When this EU call Digital readiness for schools came out, it was seen as a huge opportunity and challenge. As an opportunity to create materials designed for teachers of all levels of technical competence that will significantly contribute to their readiness to use digital resources effectively, save them time, help them motivate students to learn English and improve students' communication skills. Also as an opportunity for students, to support different learning styles and abilities, and provide personalized learning experience.