Development of EFL teacher training materials: Lessons from co-ordinating a multilateral project

Abstract

The paper shares the experience of coordinating the EU multilateral project whose major objective involved the EFL (English as a foreign language) teacher training materials development. It tackles the nature of the process of project implementation and the challenges the beneficiary of the grant has to face in order to administer the project successfully, complying with all sorts of formal, financial and legal regulations. The paper aims to present the EU multilateral projects’ life cycle and to reveal the peculiarities of the project administration. Special attention is given to the project approach and design, to strategies and tools developed to monitor timely completion of the assigned tasks, to procedures used for the execution of the work plan, and, last but not least, to the project outcomes, whose excellence heavily depends on the expertise of the involved partnership, quality of cooperation and project management. The DysTEFL—Dyslexia for teachers of English as a foreign language Lifelong Learning Programme, Comenius Multilateral Project (the European Language Label 2014 Award winner), whose aim was to bolster support for dyslexic foreign language learners in mainstream education through EFL teacher training, serves as an example here. The DysTEFL project, coordinated by the University of Łódź, Poland, gathered the consortium comprising seven institutions from six European countries. The major objectives achieved during the project’s lifetime covered conducting a detailed analysis of the EFL teachers’ professional training needs on dyslexia across European countries and designing the structure and content of the course on EFL and dyslexia for initial training and continuing professional development of EFL teachers. The DysTEFL course (the ELTons 2014 Award for Excellence in Course Innovation winner) is now available in the face-to-face, self-study and interactive distance learning modes.