European Network
of Language Teacher Associations

Europäisches Netzwerk
der FremdsprachenlehrerInnenverbände

Red Europea de Asociaciones
de Profesores de Lenguas

 

 

News from REAL

Registration is underway for the series of seminars to be held by REAL this summer.

REAL Seminar for Teachers | Augsburg, Germany: 15-18 September 2010: Bringing Europe into the Foreign Language Classroom. Click here for more details.

REAL Seminar for Teachers | Krakow, Poland: 18-21 August 2010 How to motivate students: innovation and creativity in language classes. Click here for more details.

REAL is pleased to announce that the Polish Association - Europa Języków i Kultur - has now joined its team. The association will be responsible for the organisation of seminars aimed at teachers in the project.

To find out more about this association and the other members of the REAL Team, click here.

Six seminars will be held in different regions of the EU in 2010 and 2011. Some aim specifically at associations and their representatives, and the others at language teachers more generally.

The first of these seminars, entitled ‘ REALise your potential!’ will take place in Iasi (Romania) from 4-6 June 2010 and is aimed at the leaders of Language Teacher Associations across Europe. Discussed will be how to promote language teacher associations to teachers who are not yet members, and how to strengthen their attractiveness.

Two more seminars will take place in summer 2010: in Krakow (Poland), 18-21 August 2010 (‘How to motivate students: innovation and creativity in language classes‘), and in Augsburg (Germany) in September 2010 (date to be fixed).

As part of our plans to reach as many teachers and language teacher associations as possible, REAL has recently set up a Facebook page. Here you can share ideas, find details of training courses and events, and stay up to date with news in the world of language teaching. For more information, and to become a fan, visit this page or http://tinyurl.com/REALonFacebook .

The REAL team took part in a projects meeting in Brussels, on 11-12 February 2010. The meeting was an important opportunity to keep officials from the European Commission up-to-date with the progress of the project. During this meeting, the team was also able to establish links with many other language projects funded through the Lifelong Learning programme (

In 2009 project partners participated in various events, conferences, seminars, workshops to promote REAL association in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Spain, the UK and other European countries. This year the Association of Language Teachers of Lithuania (LKPA), responsible for dissemination of the REAL network, gathered over 60 members from universities, language schools, colleges, secondary schools for the annual meeting of the members of LKPA held on 5 February 2010 at Vilnius University.
On the occasion of this meeting, Olga Medvedeva, an active member of the Board made a presentation on REAL.
The event attracted the attention of policy makers such as Irena Raudiene, a representative from the Ministry of Education and Science, who expressed her interest in the REAL association. According to her, REAL is offering a unique possibility for language teacher associations to develop their activities in the future. Information about this event is available here.
Egle Sleinotiene, re-elected President of LKPA for three years, has initiated a forum to discuss the role of language teacher associations on the Lithuanian Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (LAKMA) website. Participants have already come up with valuable ideas as to how teacher associations from EU countries might work together in the future. Click here to visit the forum.

The REAL network has been registered in Brussels as a not-for-profit international federation. REAL2 project partners signed the constitution of the new federation in December. REAL is now a legal entity and this paves the way for a more formalised structure for the network in which other language teacher associations outside the REAL project partners can participate and collaborate.

The UK association, ALL, is co-leader of the REAL2 project. ALL Director Linda Parker said:

“This is a big step forward for REAL and the chance for us to create an effective network of language teachers across the EU. There's strength in numbers and by working together we can tackle many of the challenges of teaching a diverse range of languages to a broad spectrum of learners; we can speak up for language learning and language teaching and become – as the REAL slogan says – the voice of language teachers in Europe.”

The project partners met for the second consortium meeting in the beautiful setting of Cuenca in Spain and was hosted by our Spanish partner, the Fédération Espagnole des Associations de Professeurs de Français (FEAPF) and the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo (UIMP). 

An important focus of the meeting was to deliberate on the constitution of the new REAL federation (for more details see above).

The meeting also gave us a chance to discuss:

• The details of the seminars we will be holding for teachers and heads of associations over the next two years. These will provide an excellent opportunity for teachers from all over Europe to come together to share ideas and inform themselves about issues of importance to the profession. For more info, check out the ‘Activity' section;

• The languages that REAL will use once set up;

• The creation of our final web portal to be launched mid-2010. This website will build on the success of the promotional website which was set up earlier this year.

> Read the article about the meeting printed in El Dia le 15 novembre 2009 (pdf).

Making REAL into a legal entity is an important part of the REAL2 process. It means that the network will have status and credibility. The second REAL 2 team meeting will be in Cuenca , Spain in December 2009. Here we hope to vote on the REAL statutes. REAL will be a federation registered in Belgium and governed by Belgian law.

The first REAL2 partner meeting in Sèvres took place in late February. All partners from the core team sent representatives to this meeting which was hosted by CIEP, pilot of the project. We worked hard over the four days of the meeting planning all the various elements which must now come together to make REAL2 a success. We have a demanding work plan and since many of our partners work as volunteers in the project, we're relying on a huge amount of goodwill from the individuals and associations concerned.

Over those four days together, we took the following decisions:

• build the REAL network to include more associations across the EU and the LLP countries;

• establish the legal identity of REAL by December 2009;

• run events in different parts of the EU for association members;

• create a website which will both support associations and their members and tell them more about REAL;

• tell European, national and regional decision makers about the strength and potential of the REAL network and start to work with them to help make plurilingual Europe a reality.