The Alexandria Institute organizes Greek language and culture courses in Andros, Paros, Chios, Methoni, Athens as well as on-line lessons via skype. The Institute’s work involves promoting Greek cultural heritage and conservation, as well as participating in digitization and documentation projects. Our partners share a passion for humanities, for the Greek language and culture, and for philological, historical and archaeological research.
Alexandria Institute has gained a considerable experience in teaching the Greek language and culture to people living in Greece or abroad and to people who love Greece and want to learn or improve their Greek. On the same time, we take into consideration the rapidly rising need for communication in Greek by people who pass in Greece through the borders with Turkey, all those refugees and immigrants traveling to the European Union and Europe, knowing that a percentage of these may live in the Greek territory.
For all the above reasons we applied for Erasmus+, the EU funding program. Our proposal was approved and four Alexandria Institute’s partners, Greek language teachers were offered the opportunity to participate in a Mobility project for learners and staff that enables beneficiaries to travel to another participating country in order to study and develop professional skills and competences. We attended a two weeks course in Executive Training Institute in Malta, EU. The title of the course was: Methodology Revisited, Revitalised, Renergised – Language Teaching Methodology, for the dates 17-28 October 2016 in English.
Wishing to speak about this exceptional mobility project so that we can have an impact on our adult educators, on the implementation of new teaching methods in order to serve the asset “knowledge skills and competencies” we had a meeting in Alexandria Institute’s offices on Sunday the 5th of March 2017. We made a brief presentation about the organizational information and our program’s targets and results that will be completed on October 2017. We presented some of all the interesting activities linking methodology and learning theories to today’s classroom. We focused on teaching ideas and activities to enliven Greek language lessons, to include technology and ICT in order to illustrate important aspects of the Greek language and culture.
The topics that were presented are:
- Learner Styles and Multiple Intelligences.
- Drama, Role play and Simulations.
- Designing Crosswords and Quizzes.
- Using videos and movies as a teaching method and how to create your own video by using Moviemaker.
- Using Humor for Language Learning.
- Using songs, music and stories in the classroom.
Our objectives were to enable a better understanding of language teaching, expand and build on previous knowledge using a range of practical methodologies, to help our teachers and partners reflect on their own teaching methods and contexts, to introduce an awareness of technology and ICT in the classroom today, to exchange pedagogical information and knowledge in a multi-cultural context. Our partners came from Athens, Chios and Italy and the meeting was really successful. We agreed to stay in contact and come up with ideas and activities for teaching the Greek language and culture.
