Maltese
Interest
Dr
Antoinette Camilleri Grima, a senior lecturer in Applied Linguistics
and Maltese Language Teaching at the University of Malta, has recently
met with me while attending a Reading Conference in Scotland. She had
attended a lecture on Storyline at the conference 'A New Vision for
Primary Education in Malta' held in her university in the early nineties.
Now she is closely involved with the European Centre for Modern Languages
(ECML) based in Graz, Austria. "The aim of this centre has been
to offer - generally through international workshops and seminars -
a platform and a meeting place for officials responsible for language
policy, specialists in didactics, teacher trainers, textbook authors
and other multipliers in the area of modern languages. Antoinette would
now like to see Storyline applied to the teaching of intercultural awareness
through their programmes.
News from Malta
Antoinette
Camilleri Grima’s dream of using Storyline for the teaching of
intercultural competence has become a reality. It first materialized
in the shape of a publication by the European Centre for Modern Languages
(Council of Europe), entitled "How Strange! The use of anecdotes
in the development of intercultural competence" (2002), and is
available in both English and French. The book itself is the result
of an international project which consisted of the collection of intercultural
experiences, in the shape of anecdotes, that serve as input to the development
of Storyline in the foreign language classroom. Storyline is now being
put into practice as part of teacher education programmes at the University
of Malta with the specific aim of developing intercultural competence
of teachers and pupils.
