DiscoverYourEnglishVoices

Discover Your English Voice is about more than learning a foreign language. We view learning English as a way to build a number of additional soft skills and competences beyond linguistic competences in our students. Our Language Pedagogy Centre offers comprehensive language learning programmes that aim to enhance the language learning experience of the learners that take part. By offering out of class activities, intensive language courses, summer language camps, and language clubs that provide authentic experience- and project-based education, as well as an annual „Language Days” event, we can improve learner motivation and attidudes towards language learning, foster learner creativity, improve critical thinking and problem solving skills, while also improving language levels. This process will help to increase the number of students who successfully complete a B2 level language proficiency examination, as well as improve learner performance in the national school leaving examinations. The language classes, which are created and coordinated in our Language Pedagogy Centre, emphasise modern teaching and learning methods and techniques, such as the explicit training of learning strategies, a focus on developing learner autonomy, and the provision of tasks and assignments that step beyond conventional approaches taken in local schools. Our goal is to support a paradigm shift in language learning and teaching, and to enable the teachers in the participating secondary schools to adopt new strategies that utilise the language learning innovations of the 21st century. As a first step towards this goal, the programmes offered by the Centre are often delivered by pre-service teachers who specialise in foreign language education, and part of our task is to provide thorough training of pre-service teachers to enable their work in the secondary school environment. Simultaneously, we provide ongoing professional development opportunities for in-service secondary school language teachers, who supervise and coordinate the projects and offer mentoring to pre-service teachers within the schools.