Despite all the various obstacles posed by the Covid pandemic, we are happy to say that the first phase of the Fit4DigiLinE project has been brought to a successful conclusion, and all of our outputs are now available online. The results can be downloaded from the resources section of this website, or accessed online at: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Oeu2kN6vMMJJ4HENy_fyzR3F7UjoqouF
The first months of the project were spent gathering detailed information from language teachers and managers across Europe about their views on digital language teaching; first through a survey, and then through interviews and focus groups. An interview and focus group guide is available in all the project languages. Thanks to Covid, all our interactions had to take place online, which provided project partners with hands-on experience of the challenges and benefits of working with others remotely. We are really grateful to everyone who took part and shared their views and insights so generously.
Based on the recommendations of our contributors above, the next project output was a set of 21 Good practices and useful resources cards – a quick introduction to some digital tools that have proved useful for language teaching, and to some innovative teaching methods used by various organisations to inspire and motivate language learners. Each card features a useful tool or practice, along with links to online resources, and hints for how to make the most of them in the language classroom. It’s an excellent way for language teachers to find useful resources and to take them into use with minimum effort. We hope that it will prove helpful to many.
The final product for this phase of the project is the transnational report about the motivation and limitations for digital teaching of languages, digital tools used and good practices within language education, which summarises our findings so far. The report is available in its full detailed form, and also in a handy seven-page summary.
So what’s next?
The next stage of the project is to create an online training course to help language teachers to develop their digital teaching skills. The curriculum is guided and inspired by the views expressed and the needs identified by teachers and managers in the first phase of the project. We are already hard at work: watch this space!