Mediation in teaching, learning and assessment

What has the project achieved this year?

During the first year of this two-year project, the METLA team focused on the development of the Teaching Guide which can help teachers incorporate cross-lingual mediation in their teaching practices and classrooms. The METLA team has worked hard in order to:

a) design a set of cross-linguistic mediation tasks on the basis of a specially designed template;

b) collect material for these mediation tasks (texts, photographs, videos, audios etc.);

c) develop tools for the evaluation of the tasks by experts and teachers/practitioners; and

d) find potential educators who would like to pilot the cross-linguistic tasks.

What activities and events were carried out?

Three big events took place (2 expert meetings and 1 network meeting) while a series of informal expert online meetings (6 in total) during this first year helped the team to develop bonds and learn how to work together. As a result of a fruitful collaboration, the team has already prepared 20 mediation tasks involving different languages (English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Maltese, Portuguese, and Spanish, among others). By mid-January 2021, METLA tasks will have been piloted in real classrooms and some additional versions of tasks including more languages will also be produced. These tasks will accompany the Teaching Guide and add to it a very important practical dimension. The team has also participated in numerous online teacher training events and conferences around Europe in order to present the project and disseminate this work. Many teachers around Europe are now willing to participate in our future activities!

What were the challenges?

A big challenge is working on such a demanding project with team members from different countries without having physically met once. The team managed to build strong relationships and adapted very well given the trying circumstances we all face, both personally and academically. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, dissemination of the information has also been challenging, since some of the conferences we targeted had our abstracts accepted, but then had to be postponed. Piloting the activities has also been a challenge since most of the teachers have started teaching online and they find that learning about this mode of teaching has taken most of their preparation time.

How did target audience react?

On a positive note, we feel that those challenges have made us work harder and focus on maximizing our productivity. We are a highly motivated team and we strongly believe in this project. The collaboration between the team members and several stakeholders has added a multifaceted aspect to this project and we feel privileged to be able to conduct this work. The excellent reception of the project among the target audience was beyond our expectations and this further encourages us to look forward to the coming year with enthusiasm and optimism.

Maria Stathopoulou, project coordinator

• Visit the project website (available in English and French): www.ecml.at/mediation
• Join the METLA Facebook Group

This ECML project "Mediation in teaching, learning and assessment" sets out to develop a teaching guide for foreign language teachers of primary and secondary education who want to include cross-lingual mediation in their classrooms. Teachers will gain awareness of how to develop tasks which will incorporate more than one language (e.g. foreign language + mother tongue + other languages). These mediation tasks will aim not only at making learners competent in using the target language, but they will also raise learners’ awareness of the importance of language alternation.

Moving away from the traditional way of teaching and learning, this guide suggests a plurilingual approach to the teaching of languages. Specifically, it will contain information about the theory and practice of language teaching, learning and assessing mediation together with examples of mediation tasks in different languages. The examples of mediation tasks will draw upon the new descriptors of the Companion Volume of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) (CEFR-CV).

The key points of the METLA Teaching Guide are:

1. theory and practice of cross-linguistic mediation for the development of plurilingual competence;
2. the CEFR-CV performance descriptors of mediation and how they related to learning and assessment tasks;
3. guidelines for the alignment of mediation tasks with CEFR CV descriptors;
4. guidelines for designing oral, written and multimodal mediation tasks with examples;
5. guidelines for assessing and testing mediation performance.

Cross-lingual mediation activities which ask for the parallel use of languages in the classroom can be used to soften linguistic and cultural barriers. The benefits of such fluid language practices in the foreign language classroom are many, the challenges as well!

Dr Maria Stathopoulou, Coordinator

• Visit the project website (available in English and French): www.ecml.at/mediation 
• Join the METLA Facebook Group

Mediation is both an old and a new component in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). Old, since it was included as a notion when the Framework was first published in 2001 and where it was declared an important ability. However, it was not complemented with descriptive descriptors (can-do statements) compared with other abilities – reception, production and interaction. The term is also considered new because the CEFR Companion Volume with new Mediation Descriptors was published in 2018. This important document becomes useful in softening borders between languages, ideologies, identities and in bridging linguistic gaps. Within this new context, the incorporation of translingual practices in the foreign language curriculum and classroom is essential, and at the same time teachers need to be trained in order to reinforce links between their students’ languages.

Our project, which has just begun, intends to develop a Teaching Guide for foreign language teachers (of primary and secondary education) who want to include linguistic mediation involving different languages in their classrooms. This guide will contain the following information:

• what mediation entails,
• how it can be implemented,
• types of mediation tasks and
• the theory and practice of teaching and assessing mediation.

Examples of mediation tasks for all proficiency levels combining different languages will also be included. The second output of this project will be the production of a digital Repository, a database, which will include mediation tasks for various educational environments, as well as digital materials and further references relevant to mediation.

This project draws upon pluralistic approaches to education where the development of interlinguistic and intercultural competences plays a key role. Its ultimate aim is to help teachers gain knowledge on how to develop and assess their students’ mediation skills. The challenge for teachers will be to embrace and creatively exploit the resources produced as a result of this project!

Dr Maria Stathopoulou, project coordinator

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Feel free to follow the project developments on the dedicated ECML website which is available in English and French: www.ecml.at/mediation.

"Mediation in teaching, learning and assessement" is one of the 9 new projects of the ECML's programme "Inspiring innovation in language education: changing contexts, evolving competences" (2020-2023).