The purpose of the Teacher Learning for European Literacy Education (TeL4ELE) project is to explore literacy pedagogy based on a Functional Model of language as recommended by the Comenius project: European Core Curriculum for Mainstreamed Second Language - Teacher Education. All partners have an interest in working with genre pedagogy based on its success in Australia particularly with second language learners. Most partners have expertise in Systemic Functional Linguistics which underpins this approach and others have already trialled the pedagogy and experienced success particularly with disadvantaged learners. During the first year, the project partners will establish clusters of interested educators who will survey their national literacy environments to identify key areas for development. The clusters will meet nationally throughout the project and the leaders of each cluster will meet internationally 5 times during the project, once in each country, for development of expertise, evaluation and final dissemination. Knowledge about the Functional Model of language and its associated pedagogies will be built, up by the sharing of expertise among project partners and possibly enhanced by input from experts from the 3rd country partner, Australia. Based on the key literacy issues identified in each context, the partners will make appropriate adaptations and develop materials for their socio-cultural education context. In the second year, cluster members will trial their common teacher learning approach and train small groups of teachers to trial the culturally adapted pedagogy with students. Data on teacher implementation and student literacy achievement will be collected to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach in each country. The project will thus produce a shared pedagogy and a new group of experts in the the previously trialed functional linguistic approach to literacy who will then be able to train future groups of teachers.