LIRE project - Language Interpretation through Reading
LIRE is an international project co-funded by the EU's Erasmus+ programme. The partnership involves three universities (Masaryk University in Brno, Prešov University in Prešov and Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań), primary schools in each participating country, and Dr Josef RAABE Slovensko, Ltd, the largest educational publishing house in Slovakia.
The project finishes in October this year. The project's main aim was to equip teachers with tools and materials to support and enhance their teaching practices and, as a result, transform the pupils' language learning through extensive reading. Research studies show that students exposed to extensive reading become better readers and writers, their listening and speaking abilities improve, and their vocabularies get richer. We hope to develop the pupils' literacy, critical thinking, creativity, and analytical and communication skills through extensive reading. In the project, in addition to materials accompanying graded readers, we also created an open interactive space in the form of an online platform for English language teachers to gain and exchange know-how and improve their teaching practices further. Although the target group of the LIRE project was mainly teachers of English as a foreign language, I believe that parents who would like to introduce their children to reading in English can also use the materials. Reading books with their children and doing some activities can help their children grow and perhaps refresh and extend their knowledge of English and their English skills. https://projectlire.com/home/
View from Latvia - lack of child reading is visible in teens
Hello Mr Scheffler! Thank you very much for the project and the article! It struck a cord with me here in Latvia. :)
I'm a parent to an eleven-year-old, who has developed great native language skills from extensive reading at an early age. I'm also a new English teacher, doing his first semester at a school, teaching English as a foreign language to 10-15 year-olds.
I agree to the necessity of the project "to equip teachers with tools, materials to support teaching practices" to transform the pupils' language learning through extensive reading. In my experience as a teacher I was surprised, when we did creative writing tasks from forms 6 to 9. Many of my new students showed poor spelling skills and are slow readers, while they speak and understand spoken text quickly. These students admit themselves that they have only read text books in English.