LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

Interpersonal skills across cultures (21 June 06)
Event date: 21 June, 2006
Location: CILT, London

Interpersonal skills across cultures (19 Apr 06)
Event date: 19 April, 2006
Location: Nottingham Trent University, Dice Building - City Site, Room SR1

How can key skills "sell" Linguistics to students and employers?
In this article Richard Hudson argues that an undergraduate course in Linguistics is an exceptionally good source of important life skills, given the right input from both the student and the teacher. He distinguishes three kinds of learning experience: application of a given system of categories (e.g. the IPA), understanding of how language works, and self-reflection; and for each of these general categories he comments on the educational benefits and illustrates a range of more specific sub-categories. He also list some specific life-skills that these educational experiences should develop, e.g. respect for evidence, tolerance, self-understanding. He concludes with a few preliminary remarks on how these benefits can be "sold" to students and employers.

Intercultural communication: a teaching and learning framework

The objectives of this paper are to; present a teaching and learning framework which provides the foundation for the effective acquisition and mediation of intercultural communication skills in the modern language classroom; balance the theory with practical examples of teaching methodology, materials and activities. The framework presented here merges theories of learning from the fields of intercultural education, intercultural communication studies and educational psychology.