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An introduction to LEA

Welcome to LEA. You are about to take a journey through the Language educator awareness (LEA) project, which has sought to incorporate plurilingualism and pluriculturalism into language teacher education. The project led thirty-eight people on an exciting adventure that enabled them to make rich personal and professional discoveries.

LEA is a project from the ECML’s 2nd medium-term programme Languages for social cohesion: language education in a multilingual and multicultural Europe. The main objective of the LEA project is developing social cohesion through language teaching/learning among teachers and consequently among their students. What makes it different from similar thematic projects is the focus on language teacher educators as the main addressees/target group and the focus on adequate training and raising of awareness, serving to exemplify how to introduce plurilingual and pluricultural dimensions into a language learning institution.

The results of the LEA project

The main outcome of the LEA project is a teacher education kit which consists of over 100 teacher training hours, produced by experts from 23 European countries. Furthermore, this kit, which is presented here in its complete version, is accompanied by a wide range of materials created over the lifespan of the project – these comprise: Power Point presentations, articles related to the project, reports about the implementation of the kit and its evaluation, related links and an annotated bibliography.

Note: The LEA coordinating team would like to thank all the participants involved in the project who have made this publication possible, as well as the ECML staff for their ongoing support.