This year we have started an Eramus Key Action 201 european project called ELAPSE: "Embedding Languages Across Primary and Secondary Education" from 2018 to 2020.

This project  takes into account the needs expressed by the Council of the European Union that  'teacher education programmes should be of high quality, evidence-based and relevant to needs'.

The partnes of the project are:

1. LFEE as project coordinator

2. Centro de Formación del Profesorado en Idiomas de Castilla y León.

3. Academie de Montpellier

4. Pagogische Hochschule Wien

5. Association for Language Learning

6. Centro Autonómico de Formación e Innovación de Galicia.

Research shows that language teaching has to evolve from a traditional method to a cross curricular approach. Therefore, ELAPSE  aims to develop primary and secondary language teachers' awareness of CLIL and soft CLIL methodology transnationally, build teachers' confidence and expertise to adopt a cross-curricular approach to the planning and delivery of language lessons. The focus will be on the upper primary phase and on bridging resources which can be used as pupils transition between the primary and secondary phases. Practical resources and a good practice guide will also make the project sustainable across the European Union.

The focus of this project is to enable teachers to draw upon the collective expertise of all partners, to use soft CLIL and CLIL resources to deliver foreign language learning across the curriculum. Practitioners  will be able to draw from the pool of newly created resources from the proposed ELAPSE project, and through reflection on the use of the resources with their learners, to go on to use the guidance and planning tools created through the project, to plan their own soft CLIL lessons moving forwards independently. On the other hand, Secondary teachers might have the linguistic capacity to teach a foreign language, but tend to have little visibility of Primary curricula and tend to shy away from cross-curricular methodology and practise. Our project aims to cater for both sectors and to support primary and secondary practitioners through a good practice guide, actual tried and tested resources and templates which will allow them to develop their own resources even when the project is finished.

By building awareness about soft CLIL and CLIL methodology it is expected that Primary and Secondary teachers will be able to address some of the barriers to language teaching which they currently face, namely a lack of dedicated timetabling to accommodate language teaching, a lack of confidence in delivering language lessons with appropriate stretch as a generalist rather than a subject specialist or a lack of knowledge of primary curriculum/methodology.

We are willing to work with all our partners to create and design a model for the introduction of foreign languages acquisition in all educative systems in Europe.