December 2014 e-bulletin - LLAS Centre for languages, linguistics and area studies

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News Bulletin
December
2014

Dear colleague,

Welcome to the LLAS e-bulletin for December 2014. Click here to see this email on the LLAS website.

This month's e-bulletin in brief

In the news
Community Board
LLAS events : Our events programme in full can be found at www.llas.ac.uk/events

In the news

The FutureLearn MOOC (Massive open online course)
Understanding Language: learning and teaching

The FutureLearn MOOC (Massive open online course) ‘Understanding Language: learning and teaching’ is now entering its third week. The course is a collaboration between the University of Southampton and the British Council and offers a taster of topics covered in their joint online MA in English Language Teaching.

The course has had an amazing start with 49,000 sign-ups at the outset. This number continues to grow and as we go into week 3, we have over 57,000 people registered on the course. The different topics for each week are attracting lively discussions with a wide range of language learners and teachers around the world sharing their thoughts and experiences.

In week 1, we had over 35,000 comments on the materials and the big topics of discussion were Professor Roumyana Slabakova’s bottleneck hypothesis of language acquisition and Dr. Alasdair Archibald’s talk of ‘learning styles’ in language learning. Week 2 saw an equal number of comments and users sharing pictures of their language classrooms.

This week will cover technology and language learning, and we plan to hold two live sessions: one via the British Council’s Facebook pages on the joys and challenges of e-tutoring, and the other via a GoogleHangout. Join us and join the discussion!

You can still join up at: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/understanding-language

LanguageLearningPortal

LanguageLearningPortal is an online portal developed by StudyPortals, together with Linguaid and the LLAS Centre for languages, linguistics and area studies, as part of the “Hello! Home of European Language Learning Opportunities ” project. The new portal helps students to find and compare language courses, offered by many language schools and institutes. It will inform prospective language learners on the benefits of learning another language. The aim is to promote multilingualism internationally, as well as to inform students on accreditation and quality labels and motivate quality choices. Read more....

Competition for language learners
YouTube Contest "Win a Language Holiday Abroad"

LanguageLearningPortal will help you to find he perfect language course for you. Therefore, we are curious to understand which language you would like to learrn of may be improve, and why? To participate in our contest, you have to create a video in which you tell the whole world which language you would like learn, and then upload it on YouTube. View here.....