Case Studies

The aim of the project was to develop a conceptual innovation of the existing language courses, who non-Dutch speaking jobseekers can follow by VDAB, in order to provide a more aimed and succesful flow to vocational training and jobs. This conceptual innovation was focused in a first phase on language courses for the social and technical sector, and contains 2 important focuses.
Primarily, the new courses had to be more flexible. In the original courses the focuses was already laying on functional assets, who where specific for the social or technical sector, and who were based on an in-dept research of the language skill needs. But this courses were linearly based, consisting mostly of in-class activities, what made that only less tailormade training was possible. In contrary, to a further diversification of the different subgroups of specific professional orientation within each sector to provide a more aimed and succesfull flow to vocational training and jobs.
Secondary,a system of permanent evlauation is developed with self-evaluation tools for tasks, functional evaluationtasks and a portfolio. The aim is to let the trainees reflect not only about their language skill evolution, but also about the general competencies they will need for the execution of the job of their choice. Teachers and trainees have now at their disposal tools for evaluation, whereas in the past the teachers had to set out by themselves tools for evaluation.

The target group
Primarely the target group are non-Dutch speaking jobseekers who want to learn or execute a job as soon as possible.
The more specific target group of the technical sector, are non-Dutch speaking unemployed jobseekers who wish to work in the technical sector (e.g. as a labourer in the building sector or metal industry, but also as a charioteer, as an electrician, or as a cook), but who know too little English or who are not acquainted with the professional language expertise to go to work without a preliminary professional training.
The more specific target group of the social sector are non-Dutch speaking jobseekers who wish to work in the social sector, e.g. as a nurse or caretaker. For them it is even more important that they have to be prepared on to their professional training, as well as their job.
Secondary, the other target group of the project are the teachers. Not only the tools but also the role of the teacher has to be changed in the scope of this project. The project provides not only in an intensive coaching for the teachers during the implementation phase, but has already involved the teachers during the development phase through a task force and a resonance group to make them familiar with the new tools and methodologies, and with their new role.

The main objective was getting jobseekers with language problems better prepared to start a vocational training or start working.

The products and the material are developped by the language trainers who work themselves on the vocational training floor.

The major aim of the project was that the trainees are more prepared to the vocational training and the their jobs with regard to their language skills.

The major motivation for VDAB to apply for the European Language Label in this project, is the fact that VDAB has raised a lot of experience in the field of experiential learning in vocational training. Every time when VDAB was disseminating knowhow on language training abroad, VDAB has noticed that external partners are foremost interested in the experiential approach of VDAB in language learning. External partners tend to return always back to questions on the know-how from VDAB on experiential learning in vocational language training.

Although VDAB did not set up extra actions for external dissemination, the project has been fully implemented and disseminated in the organisation itself. The internal effect of the project was very succesful: external partners started to acknowledge the language training and decided to abolish further (language) tests and psychological tests.

In the ELL event itself, VDAB has received a lot of interest from external foreign organisations in the project, and more precisely in the experiential learning approach of the project. But in the end, there were no external foreign organisations who took contact with VDAB afterwards relating to the project. VDAB assumes that the is that to transpose the material to the training context of other foreign training organisations, it isn’t sufficient to just translate the material. In an other language context, the material has to be fully adapted.
On the other hand, VDAB has had a lot of benefit from the posters of the ELLabel, who hang in VDAB training centres: through this posters a lot of VDAB’s external partners got to know the project and have been taking contact in order to get more information about it.

A suggestion is that it could be interesting to feedback the results of the other winning projects

This project responds to the priority "enhancement of quality of language teaching" by providing successful models for adapting language education to the needs of a certain group on the labour market. It also promotes language learning for special purposes and the usage of innovative methods in teaching and learning (the experiential method).