Newsletter 5: PESCALEX Teacher Training Workshop Bourcefranc-le-Chapus France 26-29th September 2007

M.Eleftheriou Fri 11 Jul 2008

Final Workshop held as part of European Day of Languages

The formal Workshop Programme and presentations can be downloaded from the News Section of http//:www.pescalex.org.

Behind the scenes

How did it all come together?

To start with, we all had to get there. This sounds really obvious BUT... there were five student teams travelling from five different countries from the four corners of Europe(Ireland, Spain, Greece, Poland and Norway). And Bourcefranc le Chapus in France, the home of the Lycee de la Mer et du Littoral, the French partner hosting the workshop and providing accommodatioin for the students, is a fairly remote destination, a three-hour journey by fast train from Paris and more than 80 kilometres from La Rochelle and 100 kilometres from Bordeaux, the two nearest large towns. Therefore elaborate plans had been drawn up to make sure that we all got there in time, But, as they say, the 'best laid plans o' mice and men' often go wrong, and so it proved for us.

• Those of us travelling via the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris were unable to catch their designated trains because a strike of Parisian taxis-drivers created delays of more than three hours. This caused unforeseen delays at La Rochelle, where the pre-arranged bus transport was waiting. and new arrangements had to be made for transport to the Lycee, which involved Lycee staff ferrying the latecomers from La Rochelle station to Bourcefrance le Chapus.

List of HCMR scientists and technicians aboard the R/V AEGAEO

• Dr. E Papathanassiou (Chief Scientist)
• Dr. D. Georgopoulos
• Dr. A. Karageorgis
• Dr. P. Michalopoulos
• One of the Irish contingent suffered a severe gastro-intestinal attack, was taken from the plane in London and transferred by ambulance to hospital. This meant that the whole team had to stay overnight in Stanstead and arrived almost one day late.
• A passport problem caused severe delays to the Game Evaluator, who also got caught up in the Charles de Gaulle traffic jams and arrived very late after all public transport had long ceased to function.
• The Polish team travelled by hired van from Bordeaux, missed the turn-off for Bourcefranc-le-Chapus and had driven on for quite a few kilometres before the mistake was realized.

However, the Lycee staff had prepared an excellent welcome buffet which was indeed very welcome after the traumatic day experienced by most of the participants.

How did the PESCALEX Language Learning Game work out?

More than a whole day was devoted to the demonstration and playing of the game. The game with its 7 stepswas introduced to the teacher/trainers with an explanation of the rules: 6 teams with three students each, with one supervisory teacher

• Each team would be assigned a language with which they were not familiar
• The teacher should act as facilitator in the first three steps of the game, where the team's job was to identify correct terms and terminology from the online module of Basic Techniques, then to find the correct answers to the questions posed from the bundle of answers provided, and finally to stick the correct answer in the target language on the proper place in Steps 1,2 and 3 of the Poster
• The teacher should then move to the team whose target language was the teacher's native language, in order to give much-needed help to the students who had to learn to speak the target language sufficiently well (in half an hour) to be able to deliver instructions to the target team.
• The teacher should stay with the target language team for the final two steps, to help in the presentation of the result of the two final tasks (calculation of haematocrit and blood cell count)

I think it is fair to say that we were all quite nervous at this stage, including the evaluator, because the following morning we were going to ask teams from 6 countries to learn to understand, carry out quite complex tasks and communicate the results orally and in written form in five different languages (English, French, Spanish, Norwegian and Polish). The team had been chosen as the control group team, as they had no previous knowledge of the content as they were economics students. The other teams had some general knowledge of aquaculture but none had knowledge of the specific area. And, just to make it as authentic as possible, none of the teams knew which language they would be assigned until the actual start of the game. The language assignments were: French – Norwegian; Norwegian – French; Spanish-French; Greek- Polish; Polish English; Irish – Spanish.

The 6 teams were assigned two largish computer rooms for Steps 1-5 (morning) and then a large computer classroom for the final powerpoint presentations (Steps 6 & 7).

Once the procedure had been explained and understood, the game got under way. It was truly impressive to see the way each team tackled the set tasks, using different personal skills to ferret out difficult information, using organisational skills to set out the tasks in an order that would facilitate a quick solution. The control group finished the first three steps first, though they knew neither Spanish nor the subject area; however, they were clearly expert in retrieving information, in whatever language they needed! They were thus able to spend more time on Steps 4 and 5, which would present considerably more difficulty for them.

There was one reluctant French student who however soon got into in the swing of the game. His involvement attracted teachers from the Lycee who were not actually participants, but who wanted to see what was going on. They commented on the degree of concentration of the students and the fact that "learning is taking place'. A tribute both to the involvement of the students, and the meticulous hosting of the event by the Lycee and its attendant staff, lies in the fact that the final presentations did not finish until 17.30 on Friday afternoon, long past the time when most students (and teachers) would normally have left for the weekend.

Conclusions

All the participants got really involved in the set tasks, they concentrated very hard, and seemed to have gained quite a lot apart from knowledge of content and a bare knowledge of terminology and grammar. The strength of the group dynamics produced an excellent atmosphere, in which there was a great deal of cooperation and a good spirit of rivalry, rather than competition.

So we're going to try it again in an improved version for the 2008 European Day of Languages!

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