On June 23rd, 2023, The Leiden University Language Learning Resource Centre (LLRC) organized its annual one-day conference , this year on curriculum change, also because in Dutch secondary education a curriculum reform is planned to be implemented in the next years, also concerning foreign languages.
Find the programme and abstracts here.
Dr. Marjon Tammenga-Helmantel, who works at the Dutch national curriculum expertise centre (SLO), provided the Keynote lecture: Awareness and support: facilitating foreign language curriculum development. She presented various tools to support foreign language teachers in deliberate curriculum development, both in secondary and in tertiary education. Meant to help teachers in making curriculum choices that suit their teaching context and students these tools focus both on awareness raising and shared sense-making and include concrete tools for lesson preparation, for instance when implementing CEFR or paying attention to multilingualism.
We attended presentations by Josh Lampe & his colleagues of the German Dept. of Hogeschool Utrecht on differentiation, by Simone Groeneveld on the development and results of a creative project of the Windesheim Hogeschool departments of English, French and German collaboratively developing a four theme course, allowing students to choose the theme they connected to most closely, but asking them to work with students of other languages within the theme. Together, the students designed plurilingual graded readers, plays, reading projects and virtual study trips.
There were relatively many CLIL-related contributions including Good practice in language teaching
course design: CLIL in the project ‘Frans als 21st-century skill’ by Rozanne Versendaal & Marie Steffens, ‘A CLIL project to foster intercultural communicative competence’ by Nadia Gerritsen, and the well-resourced workshop ‘Teaching foreign languages CLILish: creating a CLIL-based curriculum for language classes’ led by Leontes Henriquez, which we enjoyed attending.
After the presentation of the Task-based Curriculum Development for Highly Educated Newcomers (see related publication below) I spoke with some team members of the project ‘English Academy for Newcomers’ to discuss possible collaboration with the free EU project ‘CATAPULT’ platforms Linguaclick and LinguaCoP that also aim to support the process to work for migrants & refugees.
During the breaks I invited some of the presenters to consider joining TELLConsult’s tutor network and occasionally co-teach on ErasmusPlus courses organised by TELLConsult Training that match their expertise.
I also used the opportunity to inform conference participants about the results of the Erasmus+ project ‘Technology-Mediated PLurilingual Activities for (language) Teacher Education’ (TEMPLATE)
Designing pedagogic tasks for refugees learning English to enter universities in the Netherlands
Gok, S. & Michel, M. , 2021 , The Cambridge Handbook of Task-Based Language Teaching . Ahmadian, M. & Long, M. (redactie). Cambridge University Press , blz. 290-302 13 blz.