Report on Reflective Teaching Workshop for Foreign Language Teachers in Relation to Foreign Language Training for Staff at Kaliningrad State University (Российский государственный университет им. Канта,филологический факультет)

Description

This report is about an inservice-training project for foreign language teachers in relation til their teaching af staff participating in a EuroFaculty project at Kaliningrad State University. The report goes through the various phases of the project: Identification of the teaching methods used, reflection on practice and experiments with implementing new methods. At the end of the report the following recommendations are given for pedagogical development within this particular context: On the basis of the experiences from the workshop, the recommendations below can be made, but it is important to stress that the fact that there is only one year left of the EuroFaculty project sets a limit to what it is possible to achieve within this time span. a) Language needs analysis · Analyses of the EuroFaculty participants' language needs in relation to the project should be made, identifying target communication situations and communicative competences in relation to these situations. · The participants should be actively involved in identifying their own language needs, and should have a copy of the survey in his/her language learning portfolio. b) Changing perspective on language learning activities · Language learning activities should to a larger extent be targeted towards learners' communicative needs in relation to their profession and the EuroFaculty project. · A gradual shift of focus from a form-focused to a content-based approach should be made by experimenting with communicative tasks. To help teachers do this they should have access to books on the use of communicative tasks and textbooks with communicative tasks. c) Change of learners' ‘mentality' · Learners should be made aware of and trained in appropriate learning strategies for getting communicative competence. · Learners should be made aware of the learning purpose of learning activities and be encouraged to negotiate activities according to their own needs. To support this, language learning portfolios should be introd