Local organiser: Kati Bakradze, Estonian Association of Foreign Language Teachers    

ECML experts: José Noijons, the Netherlands; Gábor Szabó, Hungary

Participants: 27 (language testers and examiners, item writers, teachers and teacher trainers, curriculum developers, policymakers and decision-takers)

Programme

A three-day RELANG training event, was offered by the European Centre for Modern Languages of the Council of Europe in cooperation with the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research and the Estonian Foreign Language Teachers’ Association, and co-funded by the European Commission. The workshop module “Exploring ways to test mediation and pluricultural/plurilingual skills in the classroom” brought together teachers of foreign languages, university lecturers, teacher trainers, decision makers and other experts in language education. Participants worked with mediation and pluricultural and plurilingual scales in the CEFR Companion Volume and the nuances of the Estonian national curricula. After familiarising themselves with the documents and scales, participants constructed mediation and pluricultural/plurilingual tasks as well as developed assessment grids for them. This is an important addition to the process of language acquisition as well as assessment (both summative and formative), and the workshop helped the participants in introducing the concept of mediation to the Estonian context.

Kati Bakradze, local organiser, 11 March 2020

ECML project website: RELANG – EU-ECML cooperation agreement 2019-2020 "Innovative methodologies and assessment in language learning"