LINGUA 2 PROJECT PROPOSAL – PARTNER SEARCH FORM
Title (working title)
German (as a foreign language) following English (as a foreign language or as mother tongue)
and English (as a foreign language) following German (as a foreign language or as mother
tongue)
Summary of the proposal
The project aims at the production, testing, optimising and evaluation of teaching material for
pupils for both German and English as foreign languages explicitly using the knowledge of
English and German as a first foreign or as mother tongue, thus taking into account the support
but also the risks arising from the structural similarity between the two languages. The project is
planned for three years starting in October 2004 (pre-proposal on 1 November 2003!).
Co-ordinator
Name, institution, address Country e-mail
Ferenc Koós / Brigitte Terbe Hungary igazgato01@vnet.hu
Batthyány Kázmér Gimnázium
Csokonai u. 6-14
2310 Szigetszentmiklós
Current partners (if any)
Name, institution Country e-mail
Daniela Paradi Stai Greece stai@ellinogermaniki.gr
Ellinogermaniki Agogi
Athens
Anna Maria Curci Italy annamaria.curci@tiscalinet.it
Istituto Tecnico Statale “Vincenzo
Arangio Ruiz”
Rome
Elmar Winters-Ohle Germany wio@pop.uni-dortmund.de
Language Centre
Universität Dortmund
Objectives
Production and optimising of teaching/learning material comprising texts and exercises for
reading, writing, listening and speaking competencies using the structurally similar
languages (see above).
Testing the material in the schools in order to learn whether they are understood and
accepted by the pupils and the teachers.
Evaluation of the surplus value of this material over traditional foreign language learning
material.
How we will achieve these objectives
The teachers, using their expertise and their contribution to similar questions in recent years,
will develop the material with the pedagogical and linguistic support from the university’s
language centre.
Through testing it in the classes it will be gradually optimized in accordance with the pupils’
and the teachers’ experiences and reactions to it.
From the second year on the effectiveness of the method and the material will be empirically
evaluated by comparing the achievement outcomes and motivational factors of classes using
both the method and the material with the outcomes of classes being taught with traditional
means only.
Target group(s) and target languages
Target groups:
Pupils beginning to learn either German or English as a foreign language with knowledge of
either English or German as a preceeding foreign language or as a mother tongue.
Target languages:
German and English.
Envisaged outcomes/products
Language teaching material which makes explicit use of a structurally similar language that
is known beforehand.
Guidelines for teachers to produce such material for use in their own classes.
Empirical proof of the advantage of such material over only traditional school books in
language teaching.
Guidelines to transfer such material to other languages such as French, Italian, Spanish etc.
Expertise of co-ordinator and current partners (if any)
The Hungarian, Greek and German partners have already worked together in a LINGUA-D-
project and have produced teaching material for German as a foreign language with its focus on
literary texts and texts informing about the the country (“Landeskunde”). Within the framework
of this project some ideas were also developed about how to use the prior knowledge of English
in teaching and learning German. The Italian partner has already built a small curriculum for
“German following English” and prepared some respective teaching material.
Expertise we are looking for in potential partners
Participating teachers from schools should:
be teachers of German or English as a foreign language;
be willing to help produce the teaching material described above;
be willing to test the material in their language classes and to participate in the evaluation
process.
We are particularly interested in partners from these countries
One school with at least one teacher (of either English in the case of Germany and German in
the case of the United Kingdom) from both Germany and the United Kingdom, so that schools
from each of the target languages are represented, which seems to be one of the criteria for
inclusion in the EU programme.