E-LIVE: Engaging Languages in Intercultural Virtual Exhange

Background

The E-LIVE project addresses key educational needs in a highly dynamic, digitalised, pluricultural and globalised society. During the COVID pandemic, technology has been key to helping meet our educational, professional, entertainment and social needs.  The effects of COVID in a developed society without access to the internet and technology would have been devastating. Yet, many professionals, especially in the field of education, were suddenly confronted with new and unexpected needs, and many lacked the required know-how to be able to go on teaching and coaching learners online appropriately and effectively. 

E-LIVE aims to contribute to enhancing digital pedagogical competencies of language teacher trainers, trainees and school teachers, in order to innovate, enrich and make more effective and meaningful lingua-culture teaching by opening up the walls of the classroom, internationalise learning processes and facilitate intercultural cooperation and communication between international peers. 

Besides the digital challenge, the “super-diverse” student population present in today ́s classrooms, due to changing population configurations arising from global migration flows and diverging social, gender, age and intellectual patterns, poses serious difficulties for teachers. In addition, the plurilingual and pluricultural identity of the European Union needs to be strengthened to contribute to the creation of rich and cohesive European citizenship patterns.

Education is key to fostering tolerance, equality and respect for different ethnic, cultural, economic, social, age and gender identities. E-LIVE addresses this urgent need, by placing diversity at the heart of its pedagogical activities in order to raise awareness and understanding of diversity, to experience it in virtual exchanges, reflect upon it and learn to approach it as a driving force in our society. 

Teacher training institutions, together with schools, should be pioneering pedagogical innovations and enhancing digital pedagogical competencies and technical skills, to be able to provide together an adequate and effective answer to the new ongoing needs arising from our rapidly changing society. This is in line with the Digital Education Action Plan (2021-2027) that outlines the European Commission’s vision for high-quality, inclusive and accessible digital education in Europe. In this sense, E-LIVE seeks to strengthen the cooperation between schools and teacher training institutions to jointly design innovative pedagogical scenarios to address new challenges and better equip teaching professionals for the future.

Key objectives

The E-LIVE project brings together experts in the field of foreign language education, intercultural virtual exchange, teacher education, school education and technology-enhanced pedagogy from France, the Netherlands and Spain. The consortium addresses crucial digital pedagogical innovation and social needs for enhancing inclusive intercultural communicative competence development and digital literacies through the pedagogical integration of virtual exchange projects at language-teacher education institutions and schools. Key project objectives are to: 

1) Innovate and enrich language teacher training programmes in higher education to develop digital literacy skills and organisational, pedagogical and intercultural competences of (trainee) teachers by putting virtual exchange projects at the heart of the pedagogical programme, while promoting experiential and reflective learning as well as action research. 

2) Strengthen the cooperation among schools and teacher training institutions to: 

• jointly provide pedagogical solutions that help foster intercultural communicative competence and digital skills in authentic learning settings by facilitating virtual exchange projects, and 

•  empower (trainee) teachers to become the agents of innovative pedagogical change 

3) Enrich and make foreign language teaching programmes at schools more meaningful by offering learners opportunities to engage in virtual exchanges with peers from other cultures. 

4) Exploit the possibilities that online interactive tools offer with a view to enriching and diversifying teaching for intercultural language learning. New experiences will be piloted making use of cutting-edge technology (Virtual & Augmented Reality and/or Artificial Intelligence) to promote engagement in virtual exchange activities. Research will be conducted on the usability of such emerging technologies for language education.

5) Address super-diversity and contribute to inclusion by facilitating student participation in intercultural virtual exchange projects that promote intercultural dialogue among diverse populations. E-LIVE embraces super-diversity as a powerful synergy to enrich teams, organisations and society in general. In addition, the specific needs of a diverse student population will be addressed and activities deployed to provide the best opportunities for comprehensive social and academic development for (trainee) teachers and students in different educational sectors.

Implementation 

E-LIVE aims at scaling up the impact of pedagogical innovation to include the broad educational field of language teaching (primary, secondary, vocational, higher and/or further education). One of the main strategies to augment impact in schools is to engage trainee teachers and provide them with the necessary know-how and experience for them to be able to integrate these pedagogical innovations later in their teaching careers. In E-LIVE, 150 trainee teachers are expected to participate in virtual exchanges with their peers and to coach school learners engaged in virtual exchange activities. Moreover, E-LIVE will reach out to other interested stakeholders and offer them the possibility of participating in awareness-raising webinars and tailor-made training. 200 stakeholders are expected to take part in these webinars and we envisage 25 school teachers will engage in innovative virtual exchange pilots. These teachers will be coached by an E-LIVE expert and the results of the pedagogical experiences shared in the  Open Educational Resources (OER) page on E-LIVE´S website. In addition to the project’s direct impact on (trainee) teachers and teacher trainers, E-LIVE will ensure further impact through the open availability of validated educational resources, the recorded webinars, the multiplier events and the networking and community-building facilities on the website.

Project Results

E-LIVE will create a central Open Educational Resources (OER) page in the E-LIVE website with all the necessary pedagogical materials and tools for stakeholders to be able to integrate virtual exchange (VE) activities in their courses. More concretely the E-LIVE OER will include: 

1) Validated innovative language teacher education materials for trainee teachers to get an understanding of relevant content-matter relating to: 

• Digital literacy, affordances of (cutting-edge) digital tools to further student engagement, internationalisation and meaningful linguaculture learning through virtual exchange;  teachers as effective coaches of digital learning in VE projects. 

• Plurilingual and pluricultural Europe and the development of intercultural competences and European citizenship through VE projects: pedagogical approaches to meaningful intercultural communicative learning and inclusion in Europe.

• Engaging pedagogies for foreign linguaculture learning: innovative digital tools, gamification, meaningful tasks and intercultural learning in authentic international communication settings in VE projects. 

Nine digital texts with embedded interactive videos will be created addressing these three points. In addition 20 interaction tasks on digital language pedagogy will be developed for trainee teachers to use in collaboration with trainee teachers abroad in virtual exchange sessions. 

2) Awareness-raising and training materials and recorded webinars on the full pedagogical potential of task-based virtual exchange projects. E-LIVE will create nine interactive multimodal modules focusing on: 

- how to improve engagement of learners in language learning processes while they are immersed in task-based intercultural VEs with peers abroad. 

- how new technologies (Virtual and Augmented Reality and/or Artificial Intelligence) can impact engagement, attitudes and cognition in language learning processes. - how diversity for meaningful learning (PR3 and PR4) can enhance learner engagement in VE projects. 

3) Design and development of 100 engaging VE tasks for different target languages (English, French, German and Spanish) and levels (A1 to C1) including the use of state-of-the-art technology (Virtual and  Augmented  Reality  and Artificial Intelligence -for interaction with bots-). 

4) Approximately  15 case studies based on VE pilots that will be carried out at teacher training institutions and schools. The case studies will address relevant topics related to the central cornerstones in E-LIVE, teacher professionalisation (Digital Education Action Plan, 2021-2027) and learner motivation and engagement in VE for meaningful and inclusive intercultural language learning, e.g.: 

• How VE can promote inclusion in a super-diverse society, 

• The ways in which VE can promote L2 learners’ intercultural awareness,

• How VE can account for individual learner differences. How VE can incorporate differentiated pedagogical practices,

• How VE learning scenarios can be designed to exploit the pedagogical potential of cutting-edge technologies including Virtual and Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence. The challenges and successful outcomes when experimenting VE in these environments. The ways in which teachers’ digital pedagogical competences can be enhanced through designing and implementing VE. The digital skills teachers can develop by engaging their classes in VE. 

5) Key stakeholders voicing their best practice experiences with virtual exchange. This result will share the ‘voices’ of those who have participated in the best E-LIVE experiences. This is a clear strategy to ´humanise´ the project experiences and results and to reach out to professional peers more effectively. 

6) A transnational network and community of practice of language teacher trainers and school teachers. 

7) A diverse range of interaction platforms for VE (Moodle, BigBlueButton, Virtual World and  immersive Virtual Reality social spaces).