The European Award for Languages - success for Adult Learning!

We've heard so much gloom and doom recently about adult courses being cut. Some regions in the UK no longer offer any public sector adult leisure courses. So it's encouraging to have some good news for once and to be able to celebrate!

We recently heard that Dorset Adult Learning has been awarded one of the prestigious CILT European Awards for Languages for 2009. To qualify for these awards, projects have to be creative, innovative, have an international dimension and also be replicable - that is, the same kind of project could feasibly be carried out in other areas or even countries.

Just under three years ago, Corinne Middlemiss, our curriculum manager, had the idea for a new 'Volunteers in MFL' scheme. Secondary schools have welcomed language assistants in their classrooms for many years but the concept had never been piloted in adult learning classes in the UK before. Initially native speakers who had been learning English as a foreign language with Adult Learning were invited to become volunteers in language classes as an assistant to the class tutor. The first volunteer was a young lady from Chile who became a volunteer in two of my own classes. So far we have had French, German and Spanish speaking volunteers, and the scheme has been extended to include members of the wider community, both native speakers and those who have lived in another country for many years. Corinne has overseen the project, monitoring its progress and evaluating the outcomes, and volunteers are offered training and support.

Having a volunteer in a class does entail some extra preparation by the tutor before each class, but the benefits of having a volunteer are enormous. Small group, carousel activities are much easier to manage with the help of a volunteer. Apart from the varied types of language practice input that a volunteer can give to small groups of learners, there's an extra cultural dimension. Isabel from Chile helped my learners to appreciate that Spanish is a world wide language and that customs and ways of saying things can be very diverse on different sides of the ocean!

Have any readers outside Europe heard of any similar schemes in adult language classes, perhaps in EFL classes?

addendum - Breaking News 30.06.09 We have just heard that the same project has been awarded the Mary Glasgow Trust annual award of £2000 for the European Award for Languages which best impressed the Trust's judges!