Introduction | Advice | Course reports | Helpful hints

An important feature of these courses is that they take place through the target language. For many participants this is a welcome challenge, because it offers them one of their first opportunities to use the language as a genuine vehicle for communication.

Input and discussion in course sessions is in the target language.

Because the courses are multinational, the target language also serves as a vital lingua franca for friendly contacts both in and out of class.

Some ways in which course providers can make the best use of this situation were observed:
• encouraging participants who shared the same mother tongue to split up and work in different groups;
• building up a class glossary of important technical teaching terms as a wall-display so that nobody felt ‘lost’;
• holding daily language clinic sessions for participants to ask about difficulties or interesting points that they have discovered in the target language;
• being flexible and sensitive about when it is appropriate to insist on using the target language, and when having a member of staff able to use the participant’s mother tongue is an advantage, concerning welfare matters, for example.

While promoting the use of the target language among participants, barring participants from using other languages is not appropriate or helpful. The project team thought that we can best promote plurilingualism by allowing participants to use a range of languages, as appropriate to different situations.