Yordan Radichkov Foreign language high school is a general education municipal high school from 8th to 12th grade.
Students are 498 at the age of 14 to 19. The staff are 35 and 14 of them are foreign language teachers – 10 teachers of English, 2 of French and 2 of German. The teachers of Biology, Chemistry and Phylosophy teach bilingually in English and Bulgarian.
All students study intensively English during the 8th grade/ 648 lessons in English during their 8th grade/ and continue studying it till 12th grade. From 9th to 12th grade the students choose to study German or French as a 2nd foreign language.
Biology, Chemistry and Phylosophy are taught bilingual in English and Bulgarian.
The school is situated in the suburbs and next to it there is a boarding house. Students start school at 8 and finish school at 14,30. Then they have extracurricular activities in foreign languages, music, folk dances, drama, art and different sports.
Our students are 498. Because the students enter our school after taking exams in Bulgarian and Maths, we do not have students with special needs. We have 21 students from Roma origin, 12 students from different countries, but we are trying to integrate them in the school life.
Our school is a regional language high school.
After finishing school all students continue their education in universities in Bulgaria or abroad. They choose to continue studying languages, medical professions, to be tour guides.
Their priorities are foreign languages.
Our students are highly motivated to learn foreign languages and 80% of them choose English as their second subject for their Matriculation exam, after 1st compulsory exam in Bulgarian. Both exams are compulsory in Bulgaria to finish high school. According to the results of our students, our school is ranked in the 50 best schools in Bulgaria according the results of the compulsory Matriculation exam in Bulgarian in 2016 and it was placed under number 48.
The school received grants in KA1 of Erasmus+ in 2015 on a project “ Use of ICT and digital technologies in foreign language teaching” and 6 teachers attended in-service training courses in England and France. They apply m-learning in their everyday work.
The school is working on 2 Erasmus + projects from 2016 to 2018 as a school coordinator as a partner school . All projects give opportunity to our students to practise their English in writing and communications.
Our school worked on many projects under Comenius, Youth in action and EU Trans-border projects/ Vidin is situated on the boundary of Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia/: “Unchain your prejudices – liberty is equality” 2013-2014, “ Change your thinking – live the change”2011-2013,“Green Europe depends on our ecological awareness” 2011-2013, “Mobile identity and Intercultural dialogue” 2010-2011,“This century belongs to us” 2009-2010.
Our school was a coordinator of a project held by the British council “Connecting classrooms” 2010-2013. To serve this project Microsoft designed a platform LiveEdu to help educating young leaders among 5 countries, participating in the project. Parents were involved in the seminars too. The school council had a leading role in the implementation of the project – they made a large scale training on leadership and how leaders can change the attitude to many problems like bullying, fundraising, charity, disabled children and children with poor presentation skills. The students from our school made a film about bullying at school and it was shown on the closing meeting in Sofia in 2013, when there were representatives of 25 schools from 5 countries.
During 2015 six teachers from our school attended in-service structured courses in England and France/ 5 in England and 1 in France/ in KA1 under Erasmus+ programme of EU. The project was entitled ”The Use of ICT and digital technologies in foreign language teaching”. By using m-learning our teachers enhanced the learning of foreign languages of our students. This resulted in 1st place of our 10th grade studen Kiril Ivanov in English language Olympiad held by Ministry of Education in 2016 and as a result, the school received grants to prepare a group of students for the new Olympiad this year as an extracurricular activity.
Our school is working on a project “Combatting discrimination and bullying” and is the school coordinator of the project with partners from Turkey, Portugal and Slovenia. The duration of the project is 2016-2018. Up till now we have made a questionnaire to measure the amount of cases of bullying in all 4 schools and the places it happened. The pedagogical counselors did reports over the results of this survey and presented them to teachers and parents in all schools. The main approach to stop bullying is by using sports , music and dance and involve students in a group work on a large scale.
The school is working on a project named “Treasure in language”, dealing with idioms and proverbs and doing researches of the background stories behind some idioms and proverbs. We are a partner school in partnership with Poland, Romania, Latvia, Italy and Turkey, which is the coordinating school. The duration of this project is 2016-2018. Our participation in these projects gives added value to our school in na European context.
The contact person was the coordinator of the project “Connecting classrooms”, “The Use of ICT and digital technologies in foreign language teaching” and is a coordinator of the ongoing project ”Combatting discrimination and bullying”. Her name is Kameliya Georgieva and she is a senior teacher of English.
The key persons are 6 teachers of English /out of 10 teachers of English/. 5 of them have attended in-service structured courses in England in 2015 under Erasmus+ about the use of digital technologies and m-learning. Their names are: Daniela Rangelova, Verzhinia Vassileva, Milena Rhuzheva, Nataliya Vassileva and Sashka Petkova and they are senior teachers of English. The other teacher is bilingual and teaches both English and German. His name is Emil Zhivkov
