HHUUNIVERSEH
Thu 3 Mar
- Fri 4 Mar
2022
Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

Multilingualism Team participates successfully at the 32nd AKS Conference

Thoroughly positive feedback on the Multilingualism Programme of the Space University UNIVERSEH: This conclusion could be drawn after the presentation of the UNIVERSEH Multilingualism Team Düsseldorf on 03 March 2022 at the 32nd AKS Workshop on “Multilingualism”.

Within the UNIVERSEH Alliance language courses and seminars for students have already been offered for two semesters. The experiences gained by developing and implementing multilingual offers were shared and put up for discussion in a 30-minute online presentation in the working group “Experiencing Multilingualism at Universities”.

The participating conference speakers for UNIVERSEH were Claudia Boes, Head of the Language Centre of the Student Academy at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Dr. Seth Berk, UNIVERSEH Research Assistant for Coordination at the Language Centre, and Valérie Nanot, UNIVERSEH Research Assistant for Didactics at the Language Centre. The presentation was given in German, French and English to substantiate the multilingual approach of UNIVERSEH. The content of the presentation was the introduction of the UNIVERSEH project in general, its idea and its goals, but also in particular the development and the individual components of the language programme offered, such as the Language Café or the Space Dictionary Course as special course components. The latter has already successfully started two semester ago and continues in the upcoming semesters at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.

The feedback from the audience members – including members of other European Higher Education Alliances and the AKS Board – was overwhelmingly positive: the richness and diversity of the Multilingualism Programme and its advanced stage of implementation in a multinational and multilingual team impressed the audience.

The conference was organised by the Language Centre of the Technical University of Darmstadt in cooperation with the Arbeitskreis der Sprachenzentren an Hochschulen e.V. (AKS) and took place online from 02.03.2022 to 04.03.2022. The AKS is the umbrella organisation for more than 150 language centers and comparable higher education institutions in Germany, China, Italy, Austria and Switzerland, and it offers a forum for a joint exchange of experience and information for all institutions and persons active in the fields of practical language and language didactics training, continuing education and research.