Join us for the 10th edition of the Arqus Cafés!

This semester we are celebrating the 10th edition of the Arqus Cafés. This anniversary edition will start on 10 March and will run until 30 May. 

Tutors needed

The call for tutors is open! If you would like to become part of the Arqus Cafés family as a tutor, register here. As always, all of the Arqus languages will be offered, but new languages are welcome.

Tutors support and guide the conversation in their first or native language and encourage the participants in their learning. The Arqus Café tutors are provided with training, guidelines, topics, and strategies for leading the sessions and in many cases there are two tutors per language working together.

The Arqus Cafés

The Arqus Cafés are informal sessions where students and staff can gather, either online or in person, to engage in language practice guided by native-level speaking tutors of the respective languages. With both digital and in-person formats, the cafés offer participants a relaxed environment to develop their language skills and broaden cultural understanding without the pressures normally found in teacher-led classroom lessons. The cafés began in the spring of 2020 as a digital initiative and quickly grew in popularity among the Alliance’s member universities. Today, the cafés remain one of Arqus’ most successful activities and provide participants with both cultural exchange and a chance to connect on a personal level.

The 9th edition, which ran from September to December 2024, offered 31 cafés in 14 languages: Arabic, Belarusian, German, English, French, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. In total, 444 staff and students from the Arqus Universities participated.

During the 9th edition, Leipzig University also had 14 in-person cafés for 10 languages, where a total of 124 people signed up to practice speaking the languages they were learning together. Their next edition will run from 24 April until 9 July. You can register as a tutor and/or participant here. Vilnius University also plans to offer in-person cafés – more information will be announced soon. We hope to slowly expand the in-person cafés to other universities as well and give the choice between the online and in-person format.

Registration for the 10th edition of the Arqus Café will open at the beginning of March. To sign up, all you have to do is fill out the registration form. We hope to have record numbers of registrations for this anniversary edition. Let’s celebrate together!

Do you want to know more about the Arqus Cafés? Read the interview with the Plurilingual and Intercultural Hub, which was conducted by the European Digital Education Hub, an EU-funded initiative on digital education: