Practices

Teacher Learning for European Literacy Education (TeL4ELE)
Comenius Multilateral Project
Institutions involved:
Thematic Field: Literacy
Strathclyde University (United Kingdom), National Centre for Reading (Denmark),
University of Sydney (Australia), Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain), Institute of
Theoretical and Computational Linguistics (Portugal)
Coordinating institution:
Stockholm Education Administration (Sweden)
Key words: Teaching skills, Literacy curriculum, Literacy strategies
Description:
The purpose of the project is to explore literacy pedagogy based on a Functional
Model of language as recommended by the Comenius project: European Core
Curriculum for Mainstreamed Second Language - Teacher Education. All partners have
an interest in working with genre pedagogy based on its success in Australia
particularly with second language learners. Most partners have expertise in
Systemic Functional Linguistics, which underpins this approach, and others have
already trialled the pedagogy and experienced success, particularly with
disadvantaged learners.
The project partners have established clusters of interested educators who survey
their national literacy environments in order to identify key areas for development.
The clusters have produced "national literacy profiles" for each participating country.
Knowledge about the Functional Model of language and its associated pedagogies is
built up through the sharing of expertise among project partners and enhanced by
input from the 3rd country partner, Australia.
Based on the key literacy issues identified in each context, the partners make
appropriate adaptations and develop materials for their socio-cultural education
context. The project website provides e.g. lesson plans developed in the project.
Cluster members trial their common teacher learning approach and train small
groups of teachers to trial the culturally adapted pedagogy with students. Data on
teacher implementation and student literacy achievement is collected in order to
evaluate the effectiveness of the approach in each country. The project will thus
produce a shared pedagogy and a new group of experts in the previously trialled
functional linguistic approach to literacy. These experts will then be able to train future
groups of teachers.
Duration:
2011-2013
Webpage:
http://tel4ele.eu/
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