The two-day workshop for expert teachers in Armenia was an inspiring event on reading and comprehension advertised in schools by the Armenian partner under the title Literacy Technique: FROM Discourse THROUGH Comprehension TO Learning. Within its agenda it explored how we move from understanding discourse to building comprehension and finally transforming it into meaningful learning. All this was done through engaging sessions presenting practical strategies for teaching reading, and insightful discussions with experts and educators.
It was attended by 37 teachers from schools based in Yerevan and near-by region. The main co-ordinator of the event was and Assoc. Prof. Tigran Mikayelyan. Trainers from Khachatur Abovyan Armenian State Pedagogical University were those of his colleagues who took part in the training in Prague - Assoc. Prof. Marianna Harutyunyan, Dr. Gayane Harutyunyan, Dr. Alla Arutiunina and Dr. Lusine Poghosyan.
From V4 project countries the workshop was attended by experts from:
The event was held according to a previously prepared and agreed program, in which the first day was dedicated to theoretical aspects of the Intervention Program to be piloted. In the opening part of the workshop, the project coordinator introduced the project and its goals to the workshop participants. This was followed by lectures delivered by experts from Slovakia and the Czech Republic, combined with a discussion among the participants about the predictors that determine the success of foreign language reading comprehension, how these predictors can be developed and how to use intervention or intervention programs to develop them. The Intervention Program as a whole and the ways of its implementation in foreign language classes were also presented. An important part of the first day program of the workshop were also warm up activities for the development of reading predictors, and at the end of this day, the entire unit of the Intervention Program was presented so that the training participants could see how to work with the individual units of the Intervention Program.
The second day of the training workshop was in the hands of Armenian colleagues, who organized it in the first part of the day as parallel sessions with rotating experts. The topics of the sessions were:
In the second part of the day, group tasks were implemented with the aim of creating mini teaching modules integrating session insights. The end of the day was dedicated to microteaching and peer feedback with the implementation of teaching demos, peer feedback, and facilitator synthesis.
The workshop participants were provided with the access to the online books:
