TC-Tunisia Project: End Of The 2021 Journey
A year has already passed since the TC-Tunisia project came into being. Co-sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Tunis, the Tunisian Ministry of Scientific Research and Higher Education, the Columbia Global Center | Tunis, and Teachers College of Columbia University, this project has provided professional development in English language teaching to 30 participants selected from ten higher education institutions in nine Tunisian provinces .
A year has already passed since the TC-Tunisia project came into being. Co-sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Tunis, the Tunisian Ministry of Scientific Research and Higher Education, the Columbia Global Center | Tunis, and Teachers College of Columbia University, this project has provided professional development in English language teaching to 30 participants selected from ten higher education institutions in nine Tunisian provinces .
The project began in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, but this did not stop the young learners from being committed and hardworking. We were able to observe their evolution throughout the project but especially during the symposium that preceded the graduation. During this two-day event, the participants presented the results of their different projects which focused on several facets of English language learning in Tunisia; some analyzed the errors made by students in their writings while others compared English language books of different levels or examined pedagogical approaches. These presentations were crowned by the presentation of the Associate Professor of second language acquisition and psycholinguistics at the english department of the University of Salzburg; Simone Pfenninger who offered a critical review of empirical and theoretical results concerning understanding of content and language integrated learning, age and the extracurricular use of digital technologies.
The Graduation ceremony also took place virtually but the participants made this celebration a happy moment by sharing their feelings of gratitude to the professors who accompanied them during this journey, the poems they wrote and even sang together. A friendly atmosphere that made us forget that we were on zoom. The project team led by Dr. Zhaohong Han expressed their pride to see this project being realized in the best conditions and to see the participants evolving every day. Dr. Han also thanked the partners mentioned above, without whom this project would not be possible.
