A new EU-funded project aims to improve the approaches to teaching languages with and through digital tools

A new EU-funded project has kicked off. It aims to significantly improve the approaches to teaching languages with and through digital tools. The project aims in 3 years to update courses of methods of teaching languages and produce engaging digital courses to boost the language skills of the international students, staff, immigrants and everyone interested in these languages.

The project brings together 9 partners, including 5 universities, three language teaching institutions, and one kindergarten. The consortium is led by Narva College of the Tartu University, Estonia. The project focuses on the update of the course of Methods of teaching languages, bringing in digital tools for educational purposes, and higher national language skills in the partner countries.

COVID changed our learning and teaching practices as well as has proved that learning online can be beneficial if the materials are thoughtfully prepared and designed in a way that they can partially substitute the teacher. The high pace of the technological progress demands a new generation of teachers to embrace a variety of innovative tools and promote didactical open-mindedness, multilingualism, and life-long learning.

The project is co-funded by Erasmus+ KA2 Programme and runs until December 2025. The specific goals of the project are to develop a module “Teaching Reading Digitally” and integrate it into the course of Methods of Teaching Languages; to offer training to in-service language teachers to make sure the ideas are spread widely across the partner countries; to design a digital self-paced course to improve language skills of the general population of the partner countries with Estonian, Slovene, Ukrainian, and Latvian as target languages.

Project partners are: Narva College of the University of Tartu (lead partner), Integration Foundation, Rakvere Rohuaia Kindergarten (Estonia), University of Primorska, Koper Folk University (Slovenia), Zaporizhzhia National University, Kharkiv National University (Ukraine), University of Lativa, Latvian Language Agency (Latvia).