Introduction     (audio version)

Hello and welcome to this vocational Internet language learning programme “English for Glass Professionals“. Our school, the vocational college for glass, ceramics, and design in Rheinbach, Germany, would like to provide you with material that enables you to learn how to communicate in your professional field of glass arts and crafts.

Following current educational theories, you will not only find texts you have to summarize and translate, a vocabulary trainer, tests and quizzes, but also a lot of games like memory, hangman, or the competitive online games OASES, provided by the University of Cologne.

In the centre of this programme there are creative and collaborative tasks on the basis of videos and audio reports. You will learn to work with a lot of different publishing tools, such as wiki and blog, and to use communicative tools such as forum and chat, or in the future even video conference. Get acquainted with learning contracts and ePortfolios as well as the Glass Classroom on our learning platform TEAMLEARN.

The authentic native speaker material and the video tasks, giving you a lifelike and specific professional situation, are introduced to make it easier for you to acquire vocational glass-related English as a foreign language. Our aim: To make you fit for travelling and working in Europe, or even overseas.

Have a lot of fun while working your way through the lessons. You can do so alone, but hopefully you find some fellow students who work together with you.

The programme can also be used in the educational context of school classes. Therefore teachers can find some hints for didactic settings and methodical hints for using the given material. Look at the introduction of the glass lessons.

As we are very much interested in finding partners for “real” communication via Internet, we would enjoy it very much, if you contacted us for establishing communicative learning situations in the forum, chats, or video conferences. Whether you come from an English speaking country or not: Feel free to contact us via e-mail or have a look at eTwinning, the elearning organisation by the European Union, which helps to get schools into contact. We are registered with a project named “glass arts and crafts - vocational English”. The URL of the eTwinning website is http://www.etwinning.net. And you can find our e-mail-address under copyright. We’d be happy to meet you on the web!

The music of the audio introduction is done by former students of our college: Chinchillerz We are very grateful that we are allowed to use their music for our audio files. Many thanks to Gero Jüssen.