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About icEurope - Intercultural Communication in Europe - a Comenius Web Collaboration Project
The icEurope project sets out to gain insights into foreign language and culture learning within a web-enhanced English classroom. Intercultural communication (IC), foreign language learning (FLL) and e-learning are combined to develop intercultural foreign language competence in authentic e-learning environments.
icEurope focuses on enabling learners to use their English as a lingua franca (ELF) for negotiating cultural concepts in intercultural contact situations. Pupils become aware of the dynamic relationships between language and culture and learn to use their own English for understanding and expressing lingua-cultural concepts.
Contact is established by web collaboration via Moodle between teenagers from Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy and Turkey. The approach is based on a constructivist and socio-cultural view of content and language integrated learning (CLIL); it encourages interactive and integrated practice in classrooms and beyond. A model of language and culture learning and learning scenarios highlights how collaborative interaction in intercultural online activities fosters intercultural foreign language skills. icEurope also aims at increasing digital media skills for the purposes of intercultural language learning.
During the project, several Moodle workshops on “Intercultural language learning: Web collaboration in the English classroom”
will be held in all the partner countries from March 2010 on. At the end of the project a (digital and print) handbook for teachers and others interested will be published.
The Comenius multilateral project is coordinated by the Department of Applied English Linguistics at the University of Tübingen and involves 6 partners from 5 European countries: Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Turkey.
An icEurope web collaboration demo course is now available. You will be automatically enrolled in "guest" mode.
News in July: "Taking a Walk in the Park - Intercultural Foreign Language Learning through Web Collaboration"
Find out more about intercultural web collaboration in our July newsletter
Our current newsletter provides some information about planning and carrying out your own web collaboration activities. Also, some of our students share some of their impressions.
To read our July newsletter, please click here (pdf, 350kb)
News in April: icEurope as project of the month
icEurope was featured as the "Project of the Month" by elearningeuropa.info. What a great opportunity for spreading the word on the project. To read the newsletter, please click here.
icEurope online community goes Ning
The icEurope workshops have successfully started in the icEurope partner countries and the web collaboration pilot course is in full swing.
Now that the icEurope community is growing, we have created an icEurope Ning site. Come and join our network community site for exchange and communication between icEurope members, teachers, workshop participants and others interested in using educational technology for intercultural foreign language learning!
The link is: http://iceurope.ning.com/
icEurope Workshops starting in March 2010
“Intercultural language learning: Web collaboration in the English classroom”
Between March and September 2010, several icEurope teacher training workshops will take place in Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Turkey.
The workshops will focus on the following:
- Intercultural communicative competence in English
- Developing intercultural communicative competence through web collaboration activities
- Creating own units or activities for this purpose in Moodle & how to teach and support learners online
- Sharing ideas on using Moodle and other e-learning tools to foster intercultural communicative competence
In the workshops, teachers, student teachers and teacher educators will have the opportunity to work hands-on in Moodle and with the icEurope materials. The training materials can be used for future teach-the-teacher workshops at your own institution. During the workshops, you will create your own sample unit, ready to be used in your own classroom. Opportunities for real web collaboration follow-up and networking amongst all participants will be given.
More information is available here.
The Web Collaboration Activities in Moodle - a sample
For more project news and a closer look at the web collaboration prototype, click here. |
