How to prepare yourself for a stay abroad // multilingualism
absolutely abroad
What can you do to prepare yourself for a semester or a stay abroad? Is reading up on the country you’re planning to go to or getting information from the Internet enough? Ariane Curdy, an intercultural trainer and teacher, gives us the answer.
And if you’re interested in learning more about how to prepare yourself, or your students, for a stay abroad, then you might like to know more about a European project called LIPS. LIPS stands for Linguistic and Intercultural Preparation of Students for the workplace and the aim of the project is to identify key situations in collaboration with potential employers and students and develop an innovative media-based learning community. You can find more information about LIPS at www.eu-lips.de
absolutely bilingual
What is it like to raise four children bilingually? Elisabeth is from Austria, but followed her husband 33 years ago to England. The children have been speaking both, German and English at home, and we also asked her son Thomas, what it was like for him to grow up with two languages at the same time.
absolutely endangered
Christina Cunningham talks about how the working language of the Commission has changed since the last enlargements of the Union, and what is being done to give the less spoken languages, like Danish or Lithuanian for example, more visibility and a stronger impact in the daily work of the Commission.
The next show will be coming to you on the 9th of February from Anne Fox in Denmark.
So long…stay tuned!
The Host of this show is: Dr. Laurent Borgmann
Edited and co-hosted by: Karsten Kneese
I found your pieces on a bilingual upbringing very interesting because I was brought up almost bilingually and my daughters are being brought up bilingually in somewhat different circumstances. Many monoglots seem to believe that there is somehow only room for one language in the brain and I would challenge this very strongly. I think I may talk about this in the next show!
Just listened to you podcast. Highly interesting, especially the segment on bilingualism as we’re also a bilingual family in very similar circumstances to Elisabeth, yet we’ve only started this journey 3 years ago.
I’ve got to agree with the previous comment that children (or adults for that matter) do have room for more than just one language in their heads. We were slightly apprehensive about raising our children bilingually because there is so many myths around bilingual childrearing one of which is that bilingual children are language delayed. This has been absolutely false for us as both of our daughters have been early talkers and have proven quite capable of accommodating two languages into their lives. Our 17-months-old daughter will point to her body parts if asked, whether you do it in English or in German and will name some in English and some in German, depending on which language offers the easier word 😉 Our 3-year-old is perfectly able to hold a conversation in either language and will quite frequently translate for visitors if she feels they need to know something I said to her in German.
Raising children bilingually has been one of the most exciting things we’ve done (and are still doing)!
Dear Absolutely Intercultural Team,
I am contacting you in order to ask for your permission to use one of your podcasts in a EU Funded Leonardo da Vinci Project. The name of the project is LANCELOT http://lancelot.univie.ac.at/ and we aim to train language teachers on live-online FL teaching. Now, what has this got to do with you? The training contains several strands such as FL methodology, webconferencing technology, and the other is the ICC (intercultural communicative competence). Mark Anderson’s experience in this podcast (see show 10) presents a very good example for one of the units (the learning unit is about ‘intercultural’ knowledge), and I would really like to use this. After the future trainers read the texts we have written, they will be asked to listen to Mark Anderson’s experince in the podcast, and then reflect on what they have listened.
I would really appreciate if you could share your thoughts on this matter with me.
I am ready to provide you with more information if requested.
p.s. congratulations on what you’ve produced. We’ve been researching on these matters for over 1,5 years now, we have not met anything this useful and interesting.
Yours,
Ms. Asli OGUZ SALCAN
EU Education and Culture Programs Department
Vice Coordinator
Ankara University
Turkish and Foreign Language
Research and Application Center TÖMER
Dear Asli,
thanks for your “songs of praise” about our podcast. We have learned a lot producing it and are happy that so many of you out there seem to enjoy it and use it for various teaching purposes.
Which brings me to your question, you asked whether you could use one of our shows (episode 10) or parts thereof for your own online course.
Sure, feel free to use it, we are happy when we hear that people use materials from our shows and acknowledge the source – the only requirements are
1.) that you clearly mark where the materials come from
http://www.absolutely-intercultural.com
and the direct link to show 10 is
http://www.absolutely-intercultural.com/?p=23
2.) that you point us to the website where you use the podcast so that we can advertise your project, too. This way you help our regular listeners develop ideas how to include the podcast in their own teaching materials.
Hope this answers your question? Thanks very much for your interest and your kind words about our work! Very much appreciated!
Greetings from Germany
Laurent
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Dear Laurent,
Thank you very much indeed for the cooperative & helpful reply:)
The direct link to where the part of the show 10 will be used is http://lerndorf.erz.univie.ac.at/lancelotcourses/
This is a Learning Management System (LMS) and the content of the training is still being built. Now the podcast is there with your kind permission and the links for Absolutely Intercultural & to the show 10 are given under the ‘references’Learning Unit. I’m not sure how much of the content here can be reached by the visitors, though.
The main website for LANCELOT is http://lancelot.univie.ac.at/
There’s a great deal of material for training on intercultural competence, especially for Foreign Language Teaching, and this whole multi-national project is a wonderful example of intercultural communication with partners from Austria, Germany, UK, Turkey and Denmark!!
I will keep my habit of following your good work apart from my professional intentions, and am more than happy to be contacted if anything is needed from our side.
Kind wishes from Turkey & good luck!
Asli