Search results for "Reign"

The National Bilingual Programme in Colombia: Imposition or Opportunity?

2011

The National Bilingual Programme, created by the Colombian Ministry of Education in 2004, offers all students in the county the possibility of becoming bilingual in English and Spanish as part of a vision of increased productivity in a globalised world. However, the language and education policies promoted within this framework tend to foreground the development of English at the expense of bilingual competence in Spanish and English. This bilingual policy has been strongly criticised by several Colombian academics with regard to what they consider as the imposition in the Colombian context of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, the disregard of local knowledge and exp…

The ecosystem of the foreign language learner : selected issues

2015

This volume examines selected aspects of the foreign language learning process from an ecological perspective, adopting a holistic view on complex interrelations among and within organisms (L2 language learners) and their milieus (family, school and society). First of all, the personal ecosystem of the learner is taken into consideration, whereby two powerful influences are intertwined: cognitive and affective aspects. The learning space formed by the individual is largely shaped by their affective states coexisting in conjunction with their cognitive processes. Moreover, this specific space is also modified by a wider array of other personal ecosystems or those of cultures. Hence, the ecos…

Hand Gestures Alert Auditory Cortices

2017

When acquiring a foreign language, the first challenge is to break into the speech stream to identify basic linguistic units. The present study tested the hypothesis that hand gestures facilitate this process by alerting auditory cortices to attend to and identify meaningful phonemic information. During fMRI data acquisition, participants watched videos of an actor speaking in Russian under three conditions. Sentences were produced with just speech alone or were accompanied by two types of hand gestures: 1) metaphoric gesture and 2) free gesture. The main finding was that there was increased auditory cortex activation when both types of gestures accompanied speech compared to speech alone, …

Blending Literature and Foreign Language Learning: Current Approaches

2013

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the place of literature in foreign language learning and teaching contexts, and to show reasons of using literary texts for the development of communicative competence, intercultural communicative competence, and for individual as well as social human growth. Although literature and language teaching had been following separate paths, currently a strong tendency emerges of integrating language and literature teaching across proficiency levels. This tendency results from the recognition of the roles that literacy, multiliteracies and multimodality play in the life of humans in the 21st century. Respected bodies such as the Council of Europe or Modern Lan…

Effective Teacher Training: Teacher Lectures in Comparison with Student Power Point Presentations

2013

National (dispositions of the Ministry of Education in Poland 2004, 2006) and international (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages 2001) documents provide many guidelines and suggestions about the competencies that foreign language teachers of today should develop to meet the desired standards and obtain the necessary qualifications. These qualifications comprise knowledge and a wide range of skills. The focus of this chapter is on knowledge since it is the foundation for the development of teaching skills and of a reflective approach to one’s teaching practices. In Polish tertiary education institutions the so-called “theoretical knowledge” has been imparted by means of lect…

Sensitizing Foreign Language Learners to Cultural Diversity Through Developing Intercultural Communicative Competence

2011

Language and culture are intricately interwoven thus teaching and learning a language inevitabely involves teaching and learning culture of its users. However, this always raises a question about which culture is involved, how the concept is understood and what it means for foreign language learners as well as for native speakers of the language involved. Culture is not monolithic, it comprises a variety of cultural practices that people engage in across a range of social configurations they participate in. The present chapter addresses current concepts of culture in the context of foreign/second language learning, discusses how they relate to foreign language teaching practices (as illustr…

Dealing with Intercultural Communicative Competence in the Foreign Language Classroom

2007

Intercultural communicative competence in the context of the European higher education area

2009

Abstract In this paper, we analyse the close relationship between the European higher education area (EHEA), the common European framework of reference for languages and intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and show how the implementation of ICC in foreign language teaching can become an essential tool to acquire the full achievement of the EHEA. En este articulo analizamos la estrecha relacion entre el Espacio Europeo de Educacion Superior, el Marco Europeo de las Lenguas y la competencia comunicativa intercultural y mostrar como la implementacion de la CCI en la ensenanza de una lengua extranjera puede convertirse en una herramienta esencial para conseguir los objetivos del EEES.

Why we need TI-Oriented Language Learning and Teaching

2021

The teaching of foreign languages to students in Translation and Interpreting (TI) programmes should be framed within the field of Language for Specific Purposes (LSP). This would make it possible to pinpoint specific curricular content and methodological traits that contribute to the enhancement of the communicative competence and initial development of TI competences. This paper analyses the students’ perspectives on L2 teaching in a TI programme and how it should be undertaken to best comply with the linguistic demands imposed by translation and interpreting. A thematic analysis of 117 open questionnaires returned by students from Austria, Slovenia and Spain identified five areas to whic…

Translation in foreign language teaching: A case study from a functional perspective

2014

Abstract There is little research available on using translation as a tool to develop students’ translation and communicative competence in foreign language programmes. This paper aims to fill this gap by reporting the results of a localized empirical study, using a functionalist theoretical framework. After a pre-translation source text analysis of three texts with EU topics, data were collected by two methods: a linguistic analysis of the student translations of these texts to identify and analyze the most common translation problems, and semi-structured interviews to explore their individual difficulties. The results show that a functional approach can sensitize students to the relations…