Administration and support staff go multilingual

The Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona has recently provided a 30-hour course in multilingual comprehension for its administrative and support staff, to enable them to deal with the multilingual documents, forms and other writing they come across every day. Teaching staff from the university’s Language Service, UAB Idiomes, used intercomprehension tools to train the support staff in diverse Romance languages.

Language for youth mobility through intercomprehension

The Majic Project was devised by the French government to help young adults who find it difficult to integrate in the job market. The project encourages mobility and language learning was seen as a tool to enhance that mobility. The language component was taken care of by Mondes Parallèles, an organisation that has been active since 1999. It aims to promote language diversity and intercultural understanding as well as innovation in language teaching. In that spirit, it has supported intercomprehension as a tool for language training in the Romance languages.

Languages for Illiterate Adults

ILLIAD, the European project to promote Intercultural Language Learning among Illiterate Adults has very recently held a Good Practices Conference in Berlin.  The ILLIAD project aims to make language learning more inclusive for people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The Berlin conference included contributions about intercomprehension trainings in Spanish prisons, Swedish for Arabic-speaking immigrants, workplace Norwegian for immigrants, Turkish for refugees in Turkish refugee camps, game-based training for illiterate adults, food literacy, Italian for immigrants, the use of drama in teaching and much more.

Intercomprehension in Lithuania

The Language Teacher’s Association of Lithuania was founded in 2006 and is active in many different fields, with several European projects in their portfolio. As the protection and promotion of Lithuanian as well as multilingualism are part of their mission, they have been open to several presentations on intercomprehension and opportunities for language teachers in subsequent meetings and conferences .

Les Mots d’Or 2012: intercomprehension for business

La semaine Internationale des Mots d’Or is an annual event promoting French as a business language, and is planned again for March 2012 in Paris. Since 2008 it has featured  a day of awareness training in intercomprehension in languages for business, more particularly Romance languages. In the coming event this will take place on Friday 23 March 2012 and will be reserved for the best performers in the contest. More information on the event website.

Intercomprehension in Master’s degree courses

The Université de Provence is currently organizing a course entitled Intercompréhension et Linguistique Romanes for Master 1 students in Aire Culturelle Romane who would like to go on to the Master 2 Tourisme, Langues et Patrimoine or Recherche. Besides obtaining theoretical insights, students are familiarized with techniques to read text in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian.

At the Université de Paris 3 (Sorbonne Nouvelle), the course of “EU Awareness + Intercomprehension” features 11 different languages (including Bulgarian, Dutch, Greek and Turkish) and is part of the Master 2 curriculum in Applications Informatiques: Gestion, Education aux Médias, E-Formation.

Paris: des langues à gogo!

The bibliothèque municipale de Sceaux (near Paris) is organizing a series of talks throughout the year on the subject of intercomprehension for professionals and the public at large. For those who would like to read documents in languages other than French and  rapidly develop receptive rather than productive skills, the method can be expected to offer more confidence in several languages not previously studied. Information and registration on the library website.

Swedish through English

English is not just a lingua franca but also a great bridge language to other languages, Romance as well as Germanic. The Högskolan pa Aland in cooperation with The Open University has such a course: Swedish for beginners through English. It makes use of a variety of web-based apps and is primarily meant for young adults on an exchange programme.

Romance Languages in Scandinavia

Audiences in Northern Europe have the benefit of an intercomprehension course targeting Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French with the help of English. This course features as part of the Open University scheme in cooperation with  Högskolan pa Aland.

Community building, storytelling and intercomprehension

Since 1995 The Associazione Interculturale Narramondi onlus has been taking community-building initiatives using storytelling and auditive learning as a basis for the integration of newcomers and their families. The role played by intercomprehension in those initiatives was once more confirmed in the Convivenza Vien Narrando conference.