Learning communities approach in the primary education: Learning about bullying in the FL class

Isaak Papadopoulos, Vasiliki Liakouli, Styliani Kaleridou

Abstract


The aim of this paper is to delve into the learning communities approach that aided the students of the sixth grade of the Greek state high school to develop their four language skills in English as a foreign language and their awareness about bullying in the EFL class.  This pilot project, following the principles of the Learning Community approach, has been piloted with a class of 20 Greek-speaking children (aged 12 years old) who had been learning English for 3 years at school. It was initiated with the purpose to provide insights into developing students’ knowledge in Bullying while developing their English as a foreign language at the same time. The sixth grade students carried out investigations, developed their own multimodal material and shared it for informing the students of the forth primary school grade about bullying in FL lesson. For the estimation of the feasibility of this project, there have been used two basic tools a) a pre- and a post- test about the language and the theme knowledge assessment and b) journals kept by the teacher throughout the project. The findings showed a significant improvement of the students’ skills in FL, as well as their enhancement of thematic knowledge in victimization.


Keywords


learning communities, foreign language, content-based learning, bullying, social awareness

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References


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