The Arqus Plurilingual and Intercultural Hub hosts a joint meeting to work on the pre-Mobility Toolkit
Arqus
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21 Dec 2023
On 30th November and 1st December, fifteen Arqus members travelled to Leipzig to work on the pre-Mobility Toolkit. This toolkit is conceived to provide students and staff planning a stay at an Arqus University with language and culture resources, as well as other useful information about the universities and countries in advance so that they could better prepare themselves.
The idea to work on a pre-mobility toolkit first came up in the Plurilingual and Intercultural Hub at the second meeting of the Network of Language Centre Directors in Maynooth in June of this year. For November’s meeting, the work team assembled by the Arqus Plurilingual and Intercultural Hub has also included members from different areas of the Alliance.
On the first day, representatives from the different areas gave presentations on their respective projects and Prof. Bärenfänger gave an input session on the structure of the student lifecycle and the needs of students at the various stages of their studies. Finally, Dr. Clive Earls gave a talk titled “EMI in Germany: The double-edged sword of challenging and facilitating implicit language policy”, in which he addressed the question of non-English speaking countries with educational programmes in this language and how this affects students’ lives and why they need more resources and support in this area.
On the second day, the team focused on the very practical steps of what content to offer under the umbrella of language and culture. It was decided to focus on developing A1 courses for self-study and/or A1 online courses for each of the Arqus languages as well as a list of resources for self-learning (e.g. at higher levels) for each of the languages. The toolkit will also include information on language learning opportunities on-site and information on the language landscape in each Arqus city and in the respective country. For culture, information based on students’ experiences will be provided. As for the timeline, the team will be collecting resources and developing the programmes and will then meet online in April 2024 and in person at the annual conference in Minho in July 2024 to continue the work.
This initial kick-off meeting to conceptualise the framework of the digital toolkit was funded by DAAD.
