The main aim of this project was to improve the participants´ language competences as well as their communication and intercultural competences, so they will learn to use innovative and activating teaching techniques, to be flexible in using various approaches to teaching French and thus to motivate their pupils to learn this foreign language. The teachers needed to gain the motivation and to enlarge their international contacts by participating in European projects. We wanted them to participate in foreign mobilities to get the knowledge of new approaches, teaching methods and techniques and implement them into teaching. We wanted them to gain innovative skills through sharing of experience in Slovakia and abroad. Our aim was to increase the interest in learning French in Slovak schools, which has been on the decline recently. The goal was sharing our experience, mutual support and fighting against teachers´ loneliness and burn-out. We also wanted to persuade the schools leaders that a diversity of foreign languages in schools in an asset for them and that opening up to the francophone world will have a positive impact on the school, as well as on the pupils, not only during the lessons but also later when choosing their careers.
The project was conceived by doc. Mgr. Jana Bírová, PhD., the chair of SAUF, and arose from the need to deal with the problem of teaching French, due to the rising disinterest in this language on the part of the qualified teachers, and the students (according to the data by CVTISR, French has sunk to the 5th place among foreign languages, closely outstripped by Spanish). Another reason was that since 2019 the language policy has given the pupil the right to choose a foreign language from the 3rd class of elementary school. However, schools are far from covering all possibilities of the choice of the language. This is due to a lack of French teachers. Another reason is the isolation of French teachers who live and work often very far from each other. They make up a very small group (about 200 teachers in total) which makes them unable to share their experience, unlike the teachers of German or English whose numbers are much higher. within the region or school. Our project certainly will not solve all these problems. However, we expected that it would encourage the teachers to increase the motivation and their own credit in their institutions and thus motivate not only their students to learn this language but also their colleagues.