Foreign Language Teaching And Learning

EUROPEAN COMMISSION
Directorate-General for Education and Culture Vocational training Language policy

FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING: EUROPEAN COMMUNITY ACTION

1 Introduction
The European Community has been active in the field of language learning for several decades and has made a significant contribution to it. It has invested several hundreds of millions of Euros in practicalactions to encourage people to learn foreign languages and to improve the opportunities available to them. However, because the Community is involved in so many different aspects of foreign language education, it is often easy to lose sight of its impact. This document has therefore been produced to provide, in a simple form,

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an overview of the practical actions that have been, andcontinue to be, undertaken key facts and figures about the Language actions financed by the Community and a summary of the main innovations in the world of foreign language teaching sponsored by the Commission.

Links to other sources of information are provided throughout.

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2 The Lingua Programme
On 28 July 1989, the Lingua programme was created. Its objective: to improve the quantityand the quality of language teaching in the European Union. It came into force on 1 January 1990 and lasted until 1994. Lingua had five strands:
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3 Languages in Education - the Socrates programme
The first phase of the Socrates programme for European cooperation in the field of education lasted from 1995 to 1999. The second phase began in 2000 and runs until 2006.

cooperation betweenlanguage teacher training institutions and individual training grants for language teachers; support for in-service training of language teachers; promotion of language skills in the world of work and creation of didactic materials; Joint Educational Projects for language learning (including exchanges of young people); development of language learning materials for less widely used and less taughtlanguages.

3.1 Languages in the first phase of the Socrates Programme
Within the first phase of the Socrates programme, there were five Lingua actions:
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A: programmes of cooperation between institutions of language teacher-training; B: grants to language teachers for in-service training abroad; C: Lingua Assistantships for future language teachers in educationalestablishments; D: development of instruments for language learning, teaching and skills assessment; E: Joint Educational Projects for language learning between groups of young people in different participating countries.

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During the period 1990 to 1994 the Lingua programme:
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enabled 19,000 teachers of a foreign language to undertake in-service training abroad; helped 83,000 young people andtheir teachers to become involved in Joint Educational Projects with schools abroad; created 800 transnational partnerships to promote the training of teachers of a foreign language; gave 32,000 university students a mobility grant.

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In addition, other actions of the programme such as Comenius (cooperation in school education) and Erasmus (cooperation in higher education) also had a languagedimension.

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3.2 Languages in the second phase of the Socrates programmei
Within the second phase of the programme, the promotion of language learning is a key theme running throughout the programme. Actions A, B, C, and E of the first phase continue, and have been integrated into the new action dealing with school education (Comenius ii). Actions on higher education (Erasmus iii) andadult education and other educational pathways (Grundtvig iv) also have a language aspect. In addition, the new Lingua action v takes a more strategic approach through measures designed to encourage and support linguistic diversity throughout the Union, to contribute to an improvement in the quality of language teaching and learning and to promote access to lifelong language learning opportunities...