Training of Teachers for the Course of Greek Language

The 2012-13 School Year

1^st Training Meeting for the Greek Language Course

Nov. 2, 2012, in Komotini. Nov. 3, 2012, in Xanthi. Nov. 3, 2012, in Alexandroupolis.

Trainers: Anna Iordanidou and Yannis Frangiadakis.

Trainees: In Komotini 24, in Xanthi 23, in Alexandroupolis 13 teachers.

Topic: Good and Bad Practices in Language Teaching.

2^nd Training Meeting for the Greek Language Course

Feb. 1, 2013, in Komotini. Feb. 2, 2013, in Xanthi.

Trainer: Anna Iordanidou

Trainees: In Komotini: 31, in Xanthi 34 teachers.

Topic: Good and Bad Practices in Language Teaching – Correcting pupils’ exam papers.

The 2011-12 School Year

Two training seminars were conducted for the Greek Language course and had the following general topics:

The goal of the first training seminar was to highlight issues of teaching practice that pertain to the comprehension of texts, through the examination – together with the teachers -- of various kinds and types of texts from the (updated) support educational materials for the Modern Greek Language Course at secondary schools.

The goal of the second seminar was (a) to train the teachers on how to benefit effectively from the possibilities offered by information and communication technologies, through the examination of texts in electronic form, available on the Internet, and, in addition, (b) to inform them of the new grammar books and dictionaries in electronic form on the Internet.
 
In order to support and monitor the teaching of the Greek Language Course (and, secondarily, of Literature) the supervisors of philologists,  Eleni Papamerí (for the Xanthi prefecture) and Despina Navrozídou (for the Rhodope and Evros prefectures) conducted twenty-four training visits to schools (and a few at KESPEMs). These visits were combined with intraschool training meetings, whose aim was to deal with special problems regarding the way language and literature courses were organized within the Compensatory Teaching (CT) program, to answer the queries of teachers, and to collect data that will later be used for the evaluation of CT.

The 2010-11 School Year

Training Seminar:
Introduction to the Educational Materials for the Modern Greek Language Course
On January 13, 2011, in Xanthi, and on January 14, 2011, in Komotini.
Trainer: Anna Iordanidou
In this seminar, which was part of the general training, the teachers of the Greek Language and Literature courses were informed on the educational materials produced by the Project and the teaching methods that should accompany their use. The goal of the training was to present, briefly, the framework of the text-centric approach, and to show how it applies to the teaching of Modern Greek as a second/foreign language, emphasizing issues pertaining to the functional connection of text-context-grammar.
The seminar was conducted in the form of a discussion of specific teaching examples, and not as a lecture of general teaching principles. A PowerPoint presentation of some pages from the support materials for the Modern Greek Language Course for secondary schools led to a discussion about the teaching of texts and its connection with the teaching of grammar.

2^nd Training for the Modern Greek Language Course
On February 10, 2011, in Xanthi, and on February 11, 2011, in Komotini.
Trainers: Anna Iordanidou, Ioanna Paraskelídi, Angelikí Sifaki, Yannis Frangiadakis.
Trainees: 46 teachers in Xanthi, and 72 teachers in Komotini
In this seminar, the trainers presented the teaching materials for the Modern Greek Language courses, produced by the Project, focusing on the example of the fifth thematic unit, entitled “I get to know the magic world of theater and of cinema,” of the school textbook for the seventh grade. (This unit is taught to the seven graders about the time the training took place, that is, in mid-February). The presentation was followed by a discussion on the ways to use effectively the texts and exercises of speech comprehension and production from the support materials, also produced by the Project, the Project’s grammar exercises (with different degrees of difficulty), and the Project’s dictionary for secondary school. (See the PowerPoint document used in this training.)