scholarly journals The possibilities of the educational information environment of the university for students non-linguistic specialties studying a foreign language

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
E.V. Panasenko
Author(s):  
Erda Wati Bakar

The Common European Framework of Reference for Language (CEFR) has become the standard used to describe and evaluate students’ command of a second or foreign language. It is an internationally acknowledged standard language proficiency framework which many countries have adopted such as China, Thailand, Japan and Taiwan. Malaysia Ministry of Education is aware and realise the need for the current English language curriculum to be validated as to reach the international standard as prescribed by the CEFR. The implementation of CEFR has begun at primary and secondary level since 2017 and now higher education institutions are urged to align their English Language Curriculum to CEFR as part of preparation in receiving students who have been taught using CEFR-aligned curriculum at schools by year 2022. This critical reflection article elucidates the meticulous processes that we have embarked on in re-aligning our English Language Curriculum to the standard and requirements of CEFR. The paper concludes with a remark that the alignment of the English curriculum at the university needs full support from the management in ensuring that all the stakeholders are fully prepared, informed and familiar with the framework.


This article is devoted to the features and benefits of a professionally-oriented approach to teaching a foreign language in non-linguistic high schools on the example of engineering education. According to the latest standards of higher education (FSES 3++), students must have sufficient knowledge of a foreign language for business communication in oral and written forms. However, teachers of high schools face a number of difficulties in the formation of a foreign language communicative competence offuture engineers, namely: a constant decrease of a number offoreign language practical classes in a curriculum of a high school and a weak motivation of students. In our opinion, a professionally-oriented approach to teaching helps to solve these problems and make the process of learning a foreign language more intensive, focused and effective. That is, now, the development of strategies, methodological models and tools for teaching English, with a focus on professional communication, is an actual task for an English teacher at the University. This article presents some methods and techniques that stimulate students of engineering faculty to professionally oriented communication in English. Much attention is paid to both active teaching methods used during practical English classes, and individual work, which allows students to get more useful information and skills within the practical classes given, and also allows students to develop the need for individual knowledge acquisition and comprehension, thereby providing the increased interest of communication in a foreign language and increasing motivation to learn a foreign language.


Relay Journal ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 459-463
Author(s):  
Sam Morris ◽  
Sarah Mercer

In our June 2019 LAB session on Teacher/Advisor Education for Learner Autonomy, our featured interview was conducted with Sarah Mercer, Professor of Foreign Language Teaching and Head of ELT at the University of Graz, Austria. Sarah has published a wealth of papers in the field of language and teacher psychology, and co-edited many books including, most recently, New Directions in Language Learning Psychology (2016), Positive Psychology in SLA (2016), and Language Teacher Psychology (2018). Sarah was awarded the 2018 Robert C. Gardner Award for Outstanding Research in Bilingualism in recognition of her work. We were delighted that she was able to share her knowledge on the topic of language learner and teacher well-being with us during the session.


Author(s):  
Monika Dannerer

AbstractIn this paper, language policy (LP) at the University of Salzburg (Austria), a mid-size seemingly monolingual university, serves as an example to analyse (potential) language conflicts at the institutional level considering the roles played by German, English and ‘immigrant’ languages at the university. Language management, beliefs, and (reported) language use by different stakeholders in higher education (administrators, academic and administrative staff and students) are contrasted, also taking into consideration different linguistic backgrounds (German as L1, German as L2 and German as a foreign language). This offers an overall perspective on institutional LP that is still group sensitive, one that reveals two different hidden language conflicts: the non-addressed conflict between the two most important and visible languages at the university by far, German and English, as well as the neglected and negated conflict between German and the hidden “immigrant” languages. A consistent ‘internationalisation at home’ strategy would address these hidden conflicts and show backwash effects on ideas of language use in education as well as in society in general.


Multilingua ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (5) ◽  
pp. 587-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yongyan Zheng

AbstractThis paper examines the multilingual translation efforts of a group of university student volunteers during the COVID-19 outbreak in Shanghai. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews of the volunteer team leader, team members, and a local community health worker. Findings identified time constraints, limited language proficiency, and limited technical knowledge as the major challenges confronting the university volunteers. In order to overcome the challenges, they worked in close collaboration and used translingual and network strategies to facilitate prompt and high-quality crisis translation. Findings suggest that foreign language university students in local universities may serve as readily available multilingual resources and can be mobilized in prompt response to the grassroots multilingual needs of the local community in times of crisis. The paper ends with implications for measures and strategies to enhance effective emergency language service and crisis communication for global multilingual cities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 235-244
Author(s):  
Elena A. M. Gandini ◽  
Tania Horák

AbstractThis contribution reports on the developing and piloting of a computer-based version of the test of English as a foreign language produced by the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), where it is currently used for the admission of international students and the subsequent evaluation of their language progress. Among other benefits, computer-based testing allows for better and individualised feedback to both teachers and students, and it can provide a more authentic test experience in light of the current digital shift that UK universities are undergoing. In particular, the qualitative improvement in the feedback available for test-takers and teachers was for us a crucial factor. Providing students with personalised feedback, that is, directly linked to their performance, has positive washforward, because it means we can guide their future learning, highlighting the areas they need to work on to improve their language skills and giving them suggestions on how to succeed in academia. Furthermore, explaining the meaning of test results in detail improves transparency and ultimately washback, as teachers can use the more accessible marking criteria, together with information on how their students performed, to review plans and schemes of work for subsequent courses.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Vincent Mirabile

Abstract To teach English as a second foreign language at university levels provides the educator or professor an excellent occasion to compare the first and second languages by a series of analogical activities that not only highlight the similar forms and structures of them, but more important still, oblige students to comprehend these forms and structures without having either to rely on or depend upon their mother tongue or apprehend them through the prism of their own. In this article are compared Turkish, French and Chinese forms and structures with English through sets of analogical activities that I prepared and applied in classrooms with my Russian students studying the aforesaid languages at the University of Academgorodok near Novosibirsk in Siberia. It was my methodical experiment to bring together English/Turkish, English/French and English/Chinese as interrelated objects of study; to put into relief the interpenetrating analogical elements that these languages possess as a pedagogical approach to them in spite of their very different language families and distinctive structural and morphological features.


2020 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 159-165
Author(s):  
JULIA M. FOKINA ◽  
◽  
NADEZHDA V. PORSHNEVA ◽  

This article discusses the features of the personal-oriented training methodology TBL (Task-Based Learning), which is based on communicative tasks with the aim of immersion in the language environment. The authors of the article emphasize the advantages of the TBL method compared to traditional methods of teaching English in the university system. In the article the features of group work at the lessons of English are revealed and the factors which influence on its efficiency are formulated. The TBL method is actively used by the authors in their work with students of economic specialties, the experience of implementing the method is also reflected in the analysis of one of the communicative situations.


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