The European Flame
Why are we called the European Flame?
The European Flame is a Grundtvig project that aims to help language teachers who want to coach their students in learning and practising vocabulary on their own. The project name is inspired by the olympic flame: the participating countries pass on the torch of their knowledge and experience to each other.
This idea of establishing a European interconnection through the use of the European Flame method provides an answer to the problem that a lot of expertise and good practice in the field of language learning remains within the boundaries of the countries sharing a particular language (or indeed even within a single country for smaller languages). Teachers looking for information and ideas regarding the practice of language teaching will generally consult a website in their own country/language (or go to an international EFL/ESL site). Interesting information from other European countries is not always consulted directly while many methodological approaches of foreign and second language learning are actually easily transferable from one language to the other. By linking end-users through their own national platform to the platforms of other European countries, the European Flame will provide a new direct access to information for language teachers and connect European teachers to each other.
If you want to see where the European flame has travelled, go to our national websites:
Austria (German)
Belgium/The Netherlands (Dutch)
Iceland (Icelandic)
Poland (Polish)
Sweden (Swedish)
Why autonomous vocabulary learning?
The topic of autonomous vocabulary learning (AVL) tackles several major challenges in foreign and second language teaching: vocabulary learning is predominantly a matter of repetition and practice in different contexts. In order to acquire competence in the use of foreign or second language words, a student should be exposed to at least 5-10 meaningful encounters with these words. Frequent words will easily achieve that number of encounters but words above the +2000 frequency will need a boost and the time allotted to classroom practice is relatively scarce. The only solution is to stimulate students to repeat and practise words (actively) on their own outside the classroom. But even though a lot of opportunities are available (existing tools, input on the internet, a target language environment in L2-settings) students rarely do practise on their own because they lack the motivation to practise and keep practising:
- they have too many other options for spending their time
- the threshold to start practising is (a little) too high
- existing tools are mainstream and not adapted to the personal situation (both learning and learner variables)
- they feel practising vocabulary is tedious
- they don't feel the need to keep practising
- they don't see enough progress
- they don't receive the right feedback
- ...
And even if students practise autonomously, this is not necessarily done in an efficient way because
- the words in existing tools and activities are not always interesting for their learning process or achieved level
- the tools and activities may not fit their particular learning style or educational background
- the students are not engaged in activities construed according to sound methodological principles in vocabulary acquisition
- their teachers need more training to perform the role of coaching individual (vocabulary) learning
When students don't practise their vocabulary outside the classroom, the result is that they may start lagging behind in the language course, eventually causing dropout. This is particularly the case for weaker learners. Seeing dropout is a growing problem in many schools for adult language education, we believed that expertise aimed at motivating and organising AVL was a very useful and necessary topic for a Grundtvig project.
Other projects on autonomous learning
The website www.itta.uva.nl/learnerautonomy is the product of an Erasmus+ project on autonomous learning for adult learners with low literacy and low language skills.
De website is intended to be used by teachers, coaches, policy makers.. It contains guidelines for a focus on autonomous learning (tips on coaching, materials, literature). The website also provides information on the research that serves as the basis for the information in the website and a description of the pilots en the lessons learned in the project.