EFL Teachers and Virtual Training Environments: Building a European Framework for EFL Teacher Training

New media have recently called for a reassessment of EFL teacher training contexts and identities. Web 2.0 has expanded access to knowledge, provided additional channels for communication and collaboration, facilities for context-inspired content creation, location-specific learning, and augmentation of a teacher’s intercultural competence through extra layers of visual and audio information. Today EFL teachers have more choice about how and where to spend their training time as they use Web 2.0 technologies in their everyday lives in public or private settings, and frequently migrate to non-institutional sources of learning. The latter may be considered as part of their training ecology, that is multiple and overlapping “contexts found in physical or virtual spaces that provide opportunities for learning” (Barron 2006). Based on such premises, the paper presents an ongoing research based on “SBATEYL: A Web and School-based Professional Development Project for Foreign Language Teachers of Young Learners”, funded by the European Commission under Erasmus+ Key Action2 - Cooperation for innovation and exchange of good practices, strategic partnership for school education. Based on the strategic partnership between four European universities and four primary schools from each participant country, the specific aim of SBATEYL is to design a professional development programme for language teachers of young learners through the creation and implementation of ten online pedagogical modules. The paper initially outlines the main findings of the SBATEYL Needs Analysis Survey, which was distributed to one hundred primary school language teachers in each country in order to provide an adequate response to a ‘self-reflective’ approach to both L2 acquisition processes and teaching practices. Among the different variables considered in the project, specific variables will be selected and investigated for the purpose of the present paper. In particular, the analysis will focus on those variables concerning demands for methodological continuous training. Subsequently, we will provide an analysis of the outcomes of a Questionnaire on the piloting of some innovative online training tasks in Salerno (Italy) in order to reach some insights on potential winning ‘efactors’ in teacher training. In the conclusion, we will suggests ways of developing our research in order to contribute to the building of a European framework for online foreign language teacher training.