ILTE was a three-year Lingua-A project under the Socrates programme (1998-2001)

A main aspect of ILTE was the idea that European citizens ought to be motivated and educated to develop language skills in several languages in order to be able to understand and communicate with each other: plurilingualism, defined by the Council of Europe's Common European Framework - a handbook for language teachers and other language professionals as:

the ability to use languages for the purposes of communication and to take part in intercultural interaction, where a person, viewed as a social agent, has proficiency of varying degrees, in several languages, and experience of several cultures. This is not seen as the superposition or juxtaposition of distinct competences, but rather as the existence of a complex or even composite competence on which the user may draw.
(Council of Europe, 2001: 168)

Even if the foundation for the network project was an academic and pedagogic interest in the training of foreign language student teachers, it was evident through all the different stages of the work that intercomprehension would mean different things in different national contexts. The individual national projects were therefore developed in relation to the different needs of the countries, but at the same time with a view to the common understanding that had brought the network members together and with a view to the common strands that crystallized as the project developed.