Introduction

The VIVACE/ALLEGRO projects have taken language learning into places it does not normally reach, working in collaboration with organisations with little or no previous interest in teaching languages and people who have had at best little or no contact with foreign languages, or in the worst cases had very negative attitudes to anything “foreign” or “different”. 

Over six years, we have worked in ten countries, with groups of all ages from pre-school children in deprived inner cities to older adults in residential care, and have included groups of many different types.  

The work we have done was ambitious, often innovative and always highly rewarding and we believe that it made a strong and wide impact among those it touched. 

Some impact is quantifiable – the number of countries we’ve worked in (10); the number of institutions we’ve collaborated with (over 70);  the number of groups we’ve run (over 60 reported for the project record, others run by partners after the end of both projects), the number of learners we’ve reached (over 700).  

Other impact is harder to quantify – changed attitudes, greater self-esteem, more open minds, are all things that we’ve noticed during the course of our work, but sometimes these can only be demonstrated by example or through the voices of those we’ve worked with. 

Impact can also be demonstrated by how many providers continue, or wish to continue to offer a language to their clients, or how many project partners take up the work in their own countries after the project has ended.   Evidence of this can be found in the sections that follow and also on the ALLEGRO website.