In this seminar we will present foreign language teaching and language teacher training in Slovenia and Poland. Although Polish is spoken by more than 50 million people in the world, whereas Slovenian is spoken by only 2.5 million people, both countries put a heavy emphasis on learning other languages, predominantly English, French and German. In both countries, out-of-school exposure to foreign languages, especially English, is very high.

We will talk about the introduction of foreign languages into the school system, the most common methods and approaches used by teachers, national examinations and how teachers are trained for teaching languages. At the end of the talk, you will have the opportunity to ask questions and find out more about the two countries and their education systems.

Mateja Dagarin Fojkar is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and holds a PhD in teaching English to young learners. She is the coordinator of the in-service programme Early Foreign Language Teaching. She has published articles, textbooks, and resource books on teaching foreign languages to children. She has been involved in national and international projects (e.g. TEMOLAYOLE - Developing Teachers of Modern Languages to Young Learners; Multiliteracy - ECML; LIT4CLIL – Developing FL literacy in CLIL contexts). Her main research interests include language teacher education, and the development of communication and literacy skills with primary FL learners.

Katarzyna Brzosko-Barratt is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education at the University of Warsaw, Poland. She has received her PhD at the Department of Curriculum and Instruction of the University of Minnesota. She worked as an instructor and material developer for the LCTL Project at the Center of Advanced Research on Language Acquisition at the University of Minnesota. In 2014-2015 she led the international project focusing on creating a new teacher education program focusing on bilingual contexts at the University of Warsaw. She coordinates and teaches in the Graduate Programme in Teaching English to Young Learners, which specializes in preparing teachers for language and content integration at primary levels. She led the Erasmus + Project entitled Developing FL Literacy in CLIL Contexts. Her research interests include language teacher education, content and language integration and literacy development.

The methodology will be participative, promoting students' participation and interaction with the speakers.

Online questionnaire administered at the end of the presentation.

The seminar will be delivered in English.