Teaching English as a Foreign Language: Integrating European citizenship concepts
Cristian Brinza teaches English as a foreign language in Iasi, Romania. He is a member of the myEUROPE advisory group and he has been involved in the design of the learning objects, which are published on our website. In this article he describes his experience about integrating European citizenship concepts in language teaching.
I strongly believe in the idea of a United Europe. This is the main reason I got myself and my pupils involved in several European collaborative activities, be it Comenius projects, Spring Day role-plays, or any other activity alike. Being a teacher of English I had the opportunity of mixing the informative activities about EU in my everyday classes. Two of the activities my pupils enjoyed very much took place during the 2003 and 2005 editions of Spring Day. From my point of view, these activities offered my pupils the opportunity to practice their reading and speaking skills.
During the 2003 edition of Spring Day I and two other teachers in my school devised an interactive board where there were several questions regarding the future of European Union and their perspective on what EU meant for them. Each question had its own separate choices. Instead of writing the answers, the pupils were asked to pin coloured paper stars on the board for the corresponding answers. As soon as the boar was put on display in the hall of our school pupils rushed to take part in it. This activity was so successful that we soon ran out of the stars we initially made for this activity, and we had to make more. This activity was intended for the pupils aged 10-14.
The second activity took place during the 2005 edition of Spring Day. This time the pupils involved in the activity had to speak English and to take part in a role-play. The theme of the activity was about the decision-making process within the European framework. Before the actual activity the whole class did some research activities over the Internet and each of the pupils had to find out and understand the roles of the most important EU institutions. This step consisted, in fact, of two other smaller steps. First, the whole class had to learn about all the institutions in question, then we divided the class into groups and each group had to focus the research only on one institution. When the time came, we regrouped the desks in the classroom so that each institution would have its own “office” (the Parliament, Commission and Council) and then we started to improvise on the way a European directive comes into being. Again, the activity proved highly successful.
