Just over a year ago, the European Centre for Modern Languages together with its Professional Network Forum and with the support of the European Commission conducted a survey on the effects of the pandemic on language education. With over 1 700 responses, the in-depth survey harvested a wealth of information on the ways in which the COVID pandemic and resulting lockdowns have affected institutions, language teachers and language learners. 

 The “Future of language education in the light of Covid - Lessons learned and ways forward” initiative is now seeking to complement the data already gathered by collecting learners’ voices, offering them a channel for telling their stories and voicing their opinions on how the pandemic affected their language learning. In particular, this new classroom activity and questionnaire will ask learners to express their views about their experiences during the lockdown phases when teaching and learning were mostly not in traditional (pre-pandemic) classroom settings. They will also have the opportunity to give their opinion about how language education might change for the better in the future. 

Teachers working in foreign or other languages, including teachers of CLIL, who would be willing to run a learners’ voices classroom activity between 18 May and 26 June 2022 are invited to register as soon as possible on the following page: www.ecml.at/thefutureoflanguageeducation. Participation involves organising one or more motivating activities with the selected secondary school class(es), ensuring the learners as a group complete their questionnaire, and then completing a short teachers’ questionnaire. Following registration, the ECML will send details about suggested activities and the questionnaires. We would also appreciate it if you share this information and the registration details with your colleagues. All participating classes and teachers will receive a Certificate of Participation as a way of saying ‘thank you’ for their help and collaboration with this far-reaching pan-European initiative. 

 To find out more please also see the recording of the webinar on collecting learners voices run on 17 May 2022. 

 The overall findings of the initiative will be published at the end of the year in a book to be made available for download from the Future of language education website.