After rereading the research journals and analysing the main themes, some commonalities were found in the lessons. First, student engagement was highly visible during these lessons (perhaps, not every student was engaged, but the groups, on the whole, seemed eager and interested). They highly appreciated the different videos they were shown (e.g., Robert Waldinger TED talk on what makes a happy life, the Heineken advertisement) and it felt satisfying to know that they fancied the material the lesson was built around. They were particularly excited when they were asked to listen to a song in class (which was also made clear in their feedback), even more so because the song was close to their world (Divéki, 2019; Sampedro & Hillyard, 2004). The atmosphere of the lessons was another recurring theme in the journals: even though the activities revolved around serious global issues, some lighter activities (e.g., writing sensationalist headlines for hoaxes, writing hashtags under happy news items) made the students think that the lessons were fun and out of the ordinary. Seeing their engagement and good mood also made the lessons more enjoyable for the tutor (the author).

Some activities were deemed extremely successful based on the students’ facial expressions, performance, and feedback. These included the gallery walk activity (as recommended by Gimenez et al., 2011) with the students’ poems displayed during the lesson on hoaxes (see 4.3.1.2), the opinion line activity (Oxfam, 2018; Szesztay, 2020) from the Open your World sequence (see 4.3.1.4), the Kahoot quiz (Sampedro & Hillyard, 2004) on poverty from the Get Free sequence (see 4.3.1.3) and the service-learning activity from the What makes a good life sequence (see 4.3.1.6). Fortunately, the students were asked to give feedback on the lessons: based on how they reflected on these activity sequences, they discernibly enjoyed the lessons, but also developed their global awareness and learned a lot about the world. Consequently, it would be valuable to ask the students to reflect on any sequence aimed at developing their GC, even if they are not taking part in the research project, so that they realise what they developed and what they learnt in the lesson (either as homework, they could answer some open-ended questions, or write a paragraph, or as a cooler, everyone could say what they are taking away).

Overall, the main benefits of the activity sequences include that they are student-centred and engage the students in developing their global competence through modern, appealing materials. From the teacher’s point of view, their use lies in the fact that they do not have to prepare much for these lessons (all the necessary information is in the teacher’s guide) and the worksheets develop many aspects of students’ global competence, in an engaging way.

 

To answer RQ 3.4, the emerging themes from the reflective journals and focus group interviews were collected and analysed together. The participating teachers emphasised that they highly appreciated that the worksheets catered to their students’ needs and interests. They acknowledged that the lessons were based on up-to-date, authentic materials, which were also close to their students’ world (e.g., songs, videos, colourful images). Moreover, they were appreciative of the fact that the materials were ready-made: they did not have to prepare too much for these lessons, they were provided with a key and even some methodological tips. Furthermore, they appreciated that the worksheets were modular: even though the activities were varied and to some extent, they built on each other, they could leave out the parts that did not seem to be beneficial for their students. They also commented on the fact that these lessons were out of the ordinary: these lessons were different to the ones their students are used to, which already generated a lot of engagement and excitement from them. The level of engagement was a recurrent theme in their reflective journals as well: they commented on both the activities and the materials being engaging judged by the students’ performance and facial expressions. In addition, they were grateful to perceive that even though the primary aim of these worksheets was to develop students’ global competence and language skills, they could also be used to prepare for language examinations. Many of the activities (e.g., coming up with arguments for or against statements, taking notes while listening) and the topics may figure either in language proficiency exams or the Matura examination. The teachers appreciated that with the help of these activities, they could provide their students with a fresh take on these possibly already boring topics (e.g., fashion). Finally, the teachers also reflected on the COVID-19 situation and the depressed and hopeless mood it generated among the learners. As they put it, they chose some of the activity sequences (e.g., the Happy Broadcast, What makes a good life) to raise their students’ spirits and these endeavours were usually successful (even if only for a short time).

 

The participants suggested further tips to spice up some activities in their research journal entries and during the focus group interview as well (e.g., in the case of Dear Future Generations, cutting up the poem and assigning different parts of the poem to different groups) which should be added to the teacher guides accompanying the worksheets. It is much hoped that participating in the classroom study gave valuable experiences to the teachers and to some extent, expanded their methodological repertoire. It is, however, rather unfortunate that while the teachers did most of the activities with their groups, only a few of them encouraged their students to do the projects or the service-learning activities, which could have linked their learning about an issue in school to the real world. Their reasons, in many cases, included time constraints or students being overburdened. It would be beneficial, thus, in the context of another study, to explore how these projects and service-learning activities contribute to the development of students’ global competence and how teachers can be supported to use them.

One of the implications of this study is that it would be highly beneficial to collect good practices of global competence development in the EFL classroom on a website that is openly available to teachers. The focus group interview study shed light on the fact that such open and free worksheets can be of great help to overworked teachers who do not have the time to look for authentic materials and create their own lessons out of them. Similar websites already exist, but there is a dearth of them created for Hungarian students, reflecting their realities. Therefore, the author created a website containing these ten worksheets (and their accompanying teacher’s guides) and some others created by her and her trainees (Divéki, n.d.).