Student experiences of critical multilingual and intercultural communication competence assessment in higher education

In this chapter, we present multilingual and intercultural communication competence (MICC) as a situational and contextual process. The aim of this qualitative, empirical study is to understand the students’ perceptions of assessing MICC as a holistic phenomenon that does not represent an ethnocentric world view and considers the role of language use in interaction. We look at assessing MICC as a process of giving and receiving feedback rather than as a summative assessment. The data consist of 74 texts on assessments written by university students. The understanding of the contextual and situational nature of MICC was enhanced through a process that the participants considered as ‘lengthy …

Promoting multilingual communicative competence through multimodal academic learning situations

This paper presents information on the factors affecting the development of multilingual and multicultural communicative competence in interactive multimodal learning environments in an academic context. The interdisciplinary course in multilingual interaction offered at the University of Jyväskylä aims to enhance students’ competence in multilingual and multicultural academic communication by promoting the use of their entire linguistic repertoire in various learning situations. Throughout the course, we observed the students’ engagement in multilingual and multicultural activities. These observations suggest that simultaneous use of multiple languages in synchronous and asynchronous learn…

Developing a conceptual framework : the case of MAGICC

This paper reports the steps taken to develop the conceptual framework of the MAGICC project (2013), which aimed to provide action-oriented descriptions of multilingual and multicultural academic and professional communication competence, instructional designs to promote these in higher education language teaching, and multidimensional forms of assessment aligned with the learning outcomes established – all presented in an academic ePortfolio that expands the features of the existing European Language Portfolio (ELP) to the higher education level. “Starting with systematic desk research into the existing conceptualisations of multi/plurilingual and multi/ intercultural competences as well a…

Use your languages! : From monolingual to multilingual interaction in a language class

This reflective paper presents a new course concept for multilingual interaction, which was piloted at the University of Jyväskylä Language Centre in the spring of 2014. The course, implemented as part of the centre’s action research, is the result of a development process aimed at enhancing students’ multilingual and multicultural academic communication competences along with promoting use of their entire linguistic repertoire. The course concept was inspired by the EU project Modularising Multilingual and Multicultural Academic Communication Competence (MAGICC), whose main intent is “to integrate multilingual and multicultural academic communication competences as graduate learning outcom…

Internationalisation as students' multilingual and intercultural competencies : Developing the whole curriculum