PHAIDRA – Digital collections

Language teacher associations play an important role in taking information from policy makers to language teachers and vice versa. Europe’s language teaching manifestoes have been proclaimed for decades, but only the ones that were ‘translated’ into information to teachers have been effective – and this information is provided to teachers by language teacher associations. There are three different types of associations: a) federations of associations, the most important being FIPLV, the Fédération Internationale des Professeurs de Langues Vivantes, which is a world federation but has two ‘regions’, two subgroups, in Europe; b) international and national monolingual associations, such as FIPF for French, UDV for German, and so on, which carry out political work to support the teaching of the languages they represent; c) national multilingual associations, which promote the teaching of languages per se, and have hundreds or thousands of members, i.e. teachers who actually work at the teaching of languages. These three types of associations are fundamental to have the European manifestoes and decisions known and possibly implemented in schools.