The participation of Greece in the e-CLILT project is a result of an ARION study visit about CLIL (The Hague, The Netherlands October 2006 with PL, IT, and GR participation) and a preparatory visit to Slovakia, Zilina 2007 (with SL, GR, PL, AT, SP, FR and IT participation). From the very beginning, the educational status of Greece, where no bilingual/CLIL schools exist, was a strong challenge for us to create a training course for Greek secondary shool teachers, hoping that after the course and their on-line training (120 hours) they will be able to run the first pilot bilingual stream in one or more schools in Greece in the future. Moreover, as in Greece there are no teacher trainers specialized in CLIL at the moment, Greek teachers, after their training, will have been prepared to be the first teacher trainers in CLIL.

In our first international meeting in Coventry (Great Britain) and epecially in our second international meeting in Logroño (La Rioja, Spain), the content of the course was prepared in detail and the time allocated for each part decided. So the course (18 hours in total) will take place in Piraeus between 18–22 November 2008 in Ionideios Experimental School in afternoon classes for the first four days of the course and in morning and afternoon classes for the last day. ICT workshops will be available for the needs of training.

Greece is represented by the Directorate of Secondary Education of Piraeus. Our Institution belongs to the Peripheral Directorate of Secondary Education which is a branch of the Ministry of Education in Attiki. It supports secondary school teachers (in-service) and aims at improving their teaching skills and broadening their experience through their participation in the project. The Directorate of Secondary Education is in charge of the organization of the course in Piraeus.

Composition of teachers: at least 30 secondary school teachers are going to attend the course. These include foreign language teachers (who are in some cases also subject teachers), 5 or 6 philologists (Philologists in Greece usually teach many subjects e.g. History, Literature, Sociology, Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, Latin, Philosophy), 1 or 2 teachers of science (Physics and Chemistry or Biology) and possibly 2 or 3 ICT teachers.

Dr. Demetra Bechlikoudi, a state school advisor and the contact person in the project has undertaken all the co-ordination of the participants and has already interviewed them and supported by the Director of Secondary Education of Piraeus, Mr. John Xanthopoulidis, at the beginning of September is going to prepare everything for the course. First of all she is going to call all the Greek teachers (participants) to a preparatory meeting before November.

In conclusion, we believe that familiarization with:

• a variety of chosen methodological concepts including a skills approach, learner autonomy (learner-oriented methods), co-operative learning and a task-based approach
• the concept of cultural dimension
• what CLIL is and its existing practices in Europe
• the idea of tolerance and understanding of other cultures and mentalities
• the need to develop a high competence in language communication for themselves and their students
• the need to achieve bi-cultural and inter-cultural competence in the framework of the European Community
• the importance of learning a variety of teaching techniques with a variety of materials, including computer-assisted learning

will give our teachers a valuable chance to refresh their pedagogical and teaching approaches, to focus on some new ideas, attitudes and ways of organizing classroom activities, to exchange beliefs and thoughts, to be in a foreign language speaking environment and to benefit from the experience of 16-17 brilliant and professional teacher trainers from other European countries. In addition, it will be a great honour for all of us to meet David Marsh, the ‘father’ of CLIL in Europe, who will be working with the teacher trainers on our course.