Project Idea

Training course “Make a party – improve your project!” aims to develop young people’s competences which are of importance improving quality of international youth project implementation. Training course will comprise development of young people’s competences in two aspects: sociolinguistic competence in English and project management skills. The initiators of the project refer to sociolinguistic competence as to the ability to interpret the social meaning of the choice of linguistic varieties and to use language with the appropriate social meaning for the communication situation . Using the phases of project management as a framework for the whole course, the participants will conduct assignments for development of language skills and they will be provided with language structures and its varieties appropriate in a particular social context. Practical application of theoretical knowledge while carrying out the assignments will be observed by experts of the English language with no shorter than 10 year experience of successful teaching of English applying active methods. Project management skills include development of abilities to generate and select ideas, to make team decisions, to increase motivation, to distribute or delegate functions within the team and to establish and promote partnership-based cooperation.

Planning of the project

The organisation of a festive event has been selected as suitable for imitation of a small project. Sixteen participants from four different EU countries are divided into four groups, each group containing one leader of a youth organisation. The groups get the same task: to arrange a festive even (party) for the other participants of the training. The actual organisation of the event is carried out in stages, which serves as a basis for development of young people’s skills. Each day of the training is devoted to separate project making and implementation processes: 1) generation of ideas and team decision making (the participants decide on the theme and type of festive event/party their team want to arrange through application of various methods and techniques of decision making); 2) distribution of functions among team members and development of activity plan (team members carry out self-assessment and make decisions on the actions and function they are responsible for); 3) establishment of partnership networks (teams find out that time for the organisation of the event is limited – only one evening can be devoted to their party/event and that the same task has been started by the other three teams – thus, they have to meet the other teams and to decide which festival/party to choose and how to distribute the functions). The joint festive event/party organised in the course of training is to answer certain requirements such as: involvement of all the participants, reflection of cultural peculiarities characteristic of the countries in the project, etc. The teaching programme will be based on active teaching/learning methods and techniques: discussions, simulations, team work, theatrical improvisations, etc. To evaluate participants’ involvement and performance during the completion of assignments, they will be filmed and the material will be openly discussed in feedback sessions at the end of every training day. After the project each national team is to organise and implement the festive event created and conducted during the training in their organisations and to film them. The films will be placed on organisation websites. All the participants will work on and prepare methodological guidelines “Organisation of international festive event: from ideas to their implementation“.

Objectives of the project

• To encourage discussions on improvement of international project quality, to analyse main factors determining project quality improvement and to exchange experience gained in various countries; To analyse influence of each project implementation stage on total project quality through practical realisation of small attractive projects (festive events); To facilitate development of project management abilities: to generate ideas and make team decisions, to distribute functions, to develop activity plans and to establish partnership networks; To promote understanding of significance of sociolinguistic competence to international project quality and to develop appropriate language skills in the project management context through active teaching/learning techniques under supervision of English language experts; To identify the most efficient methods of disseminating the information regarding further development of the skills acquired during the training; to pass these methods and techniques on to other young people organising festive events together.

The training course will take place in a country tourism place not far from Vilnius . Program also will include cultural programme to familiarize the participants with the surrounding area and way of living in Lithuania . That will enable us to know each other better and to cooperate more successfully.

For more information on the schedule of activities, please download the program.