Hope to hear from you soon: a pilot E-mail project in vocational education

Dette foredrag havde et stærkt dansk islæt. Foredragsholderen Martine er fra Holland, men har lært sig dansk af interesse for dansk kultur. Efter et ophold på Kalø sproghøjskole i sommer taler hun nu flydende og ubesværet dansk.

Selve foredraget har Matine lavet i samarbejde med Marianne Hartelius fra Danmark, men Marianne kunne af glædelige årsager i familien ikke deltage i dette års EuroCall.

Deres projekt som Martine fortalte om er et af de særdeles værdifulde græsrodsprojekter som opstår når sprogkolleger på tværs af grænserne falder i snak på en konference og derefter afprøver deres teorier i praksis, og det uden en eneste krone eller Euro i støtte!

Hope to hear from you soon: a pilot E-mail project in vocational education

After meeting at two consecutive Eurocall conferences, two teachers of English, at The Business College in Ballerup and NHTV Breda University of Professional Education in Breda decided to initiate an e-mail project. Students from both schools helped each other write a brochure for exchange students wishing to visit their school, so that these students would be informed in the best possible way on the school, the town and the people they would visit.

Being a relatively small-scale project, comprising only 30 Danish and 30 Dutch students in the age of 16 to 20 and taking place from November to December 2001, the project nonetheless offers valuable insights into the areas of language learning, cross-cultural communication, written (e-mail) communication as well as networked language learning.

We decided to use two methods of cooperation to find out which would work better: Dutch students had to verify that the information they had found was correct without asking for explicit information if they could avoid it, and Danish students had to send questionnaires to the Netherlands.

At the end of the project we held an evaluation in which we asked all students what they thought of the project. Most students really liked the project and gave some useful hints on how to improve a project like this in years to come. The two working methods did not really emerge the way we would have hoped, which will be taken into account when we design a new project next year.

In this project we encountered several problems, which were both practical and didactic. In our Show and Tell we will elaborate on these problems (such as difficulties in matching the curricula of participating countries) and the improvements we intend to make to make next year's project (even) more successful. Apart from that we will try and give general advice on how (not) to proceed if colleagues are interested in embarking on a similar journey.