1.0 Introduction

In October 1997 the Spanish national Socrates office arranged a partner finding seminar in Salamanca in order to motivate seminar participants to establish networks and to initiate project ideas related to the teaching of foreign languages in teacher training. One of these networks designed Intercomprehension in Language Teacher Education (ILTE), a three-year project involving six partner institutions in six European countries: Portugal, Spain, Italy, Austria, England, and Norway, with the Portuguese institution as coordinator.

Norway was represented by Østfold University College, Faculty of Education, with a team consisting of two faculty teachers (one in English and one in pedagogy) and three mentors and school teachers (two in primary school and one in lower secondary school).

The Norwegian partner's motivation for participating in the network was among other things an ambition to establish links between new signals in the national curriculum guidelines for compulsory education and the notion of intercomprehension, as discussed and defined by the network.

The present report discusses how teacher training modules based on intercomprehension ideas have been developed. The report has a past and a future orientation: the past orientation has to do with several experiments in primary and lower secondary school designed to assess approaches and activities that address intercomprehension in the classroom, the future orientation has to do with the modules which have been devised as a consequence and which are currently being tested.

The ideas presented are meant to motivate teacher trainers and school teachers to think of the teaching of foreign languages in a broader perspective than what has traditionally been the case among most foreign language teachers. Hopefully this report will also initiate discussion of what it actually can mean to teach a foreign language. From language teacher to teacher of languages can thus be seen both as a slogan and as a goal for the ideas presented in this report.

Next - 2.0 The ILTE project - ideas, definition, aim

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