Global Holiday Course project: Core English Content

Description

The British Council is investigating if there are suitable providers for a future tender to supply English language learning content for courses for the primary (6-11), secondary (12-14) & upper secondary (15-17) age groups taking place in holiday periods in 43 countries across the British Council network. A contract would initially be for two years with provision for extension up to a further three years (2+1+1+1). Lot 1: The British Council intends to provide a flexible, English holiday course offer for Primary (6-11 years old), Secondary (12-14 years old) & Upper Secondary (15-17 years old) learners which combines British Council English teaching expertise with materials from leading brands in the areas of STEM, Coding, Gaming etc that spark their natural interests to make learning English a fun and memorable adventure. Learners will use their creativity and imagination in hands-on, interactive projects to build skills like problem solving, teamwork and critical thinking. The Young Learner holiday course design will be made up of two parts: - core-English classes (approximately 2 hours per day), - optional, add-on activity sessions (approximately 1-2 hours per day). It is intended for the activity sessions to be integrated (thematically, topically, linguistically) to the core-English classes, in order to provide students with an opportunity to apply, demonstrate and extend their new language skills and knowledge. The teaching and learning goals for these sessions prioritise the cross-disciplinary knowledge and skills needed to complete the activity (for example, how to code or the physics of how a lever works) rather than target language aims. These activity sessions would use a variety of 3rd party content & ideally - take a project-based format requiring students to work towards an outcome over a number of sessions (matching in length to a core-English unit); - challenge students with highly-motivating, engaging activities such as, STEM inquiry, coding and gaming, story-telling and journalism, or drama and arts; - require students to work collaboratively; - require students to apply the English learnt in core-English classes in order to complete the activity. An example of how activity sessions complement core-English classes is as follows: core-English (10 hours) – unit on the body and movement. The target language might include body related lexis, describing movement, prepositions of place, can+verb to express ability. activity sessions (5-10 hours) - students are prompted to collaboratively build a working, moving model of a robot arm. The robot arm must be built and tested resulting in students using the language from their core-English classes in order to communicate during their work and to articulate the outcome. (e.g., The arm moves by..., the fingers can grip..., the material used for the muscles is ...) This offer will allow learners to register for one or multiple theme-based English units across holiday periods. It will provide tangible outcomes in English and life skills which enable clear progress tracking, including formative and summative assessment for each unit. We require English language learning and teaching content, mapped to the CEFR, for six levels of Primary covering the A0-B1 range & Secondary learners at A1, A2, B1, B2 and C1 level. An A0 level would be an advantage. Each level will provide a minimum of 8 units (approx. 10-15 hours/ unit) of core learning which can be taught in F2F or virtual teacher-led live lessons. The English content must be available at a unit level (activity, audio, video, etc) & come from an English language learning series for Primary (6-12) and Secondary (12-17) year olds which meets the British Council Holiday course value proposition informed by customer drivers. It would be advantageous if the content is digital-ready and offer student-facing and teacher-facing content for asynchronous pre- and post-lesson self-study as well as the content on which to base our live lessons.