Abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to present a vertically coordinated project involving the participation of lecturers and students from different year groups and different universities in interlevel and international collaboration activities; hence the acronym of the project in Spanish: CO (from COllaboration) and DOS (meaning two: interlevel and international). CODOS (‘elbows’ in Spanish) alludes to teamwork (working ‘elbow to elbow’), which is the main soft skill this project aims to foster, along with other key competencies such as learning to learn, linguistic, intercultural, digital, critical thinking, communication and creativity skills.

The project, spanning from April to December 2021, is implemented in five courses in the Primary Education degree at the University of León (Spain). Three of the courses deal with English language teaching to young learners, in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd years of the degree; one of the courses in the 4th year is an introduction to contemporary English literature and the other focuses on teaching grammar and vocabulary in primary education. The first stage of the project consists of the coordination of the professors involved, in order to unify criteria regarding the objectives, content, methodology, resources and assessment used, as well as the preparation of the collaborative activities. The second stage applies this previous groundwork to 4 specific collaborative and telecollaborative activities where our students will work together with partners in the same year group/ different year groups/ foreign universities:
a) virtual exchange between juniors and American students from the University of Central Missouri, including conversations about intercultural topics and breaking out of digital escape rooms with each other’s help,
b) design of digital escape rooms for Primary Education by juniors and simulation for freshmen,
c) interviews with seniors prepared by freshmen and
d) use of a video chat platform, Conversifi, by sophomores and seniors to have conversations with English-speaking students worldwide.

This paper describes work in progress of the project with all the participants in the aforementioned courses, both professors and undergraduate students, and the coordinated activities. However, most of the activities proposed have been successfully carried out in pilot studies in the last few years. The effectiveness of this project will be measured by means of:
a) the learning evidence presented by the students (which will be graded as part of their formative assessment),
b) awareness-raising questionnaires that will lead the students to reflect on their learning process and
c) the project self-assessment carried out by the lecturers.

We expect that the coordination of these courses will allow for the establishment of connections and will also help to detect overlapping content and to avoid unnecessary repetition, thus fostering a sense of coherence within the degree. In addition, taking part in communicative activities with a wider range of students (including English-speakers), not only their classmates, will most probably enable our students to gain fluency, confidence and motivation, which will contribute to their training as future teachers of English in Primary Education.

Keywords:

Vertically coordinated project, interlevel, international, collaboration, coordination, virtual exchange, digital escape rooms.