Innovation in Language Learning

At the Language Centre of the University of Cambridge we offer FL Academic Reading Courses in French, German, Italian and Spanish to postgraduate students. The vast majority of these student are enrolled in PhD programmes and are researchers.

            The students’ varied academic, cultural and linguistic (50%+ don’t have English as their mother tongue) background  poses acute methodological problems. Furthermore, being researchers (not in a taught course) students don’t have a unified reading list and therefore, also have diverse needs.

             The selection of adequate reading materials and appropriate methodologies clearly represents a challenge. Apart from transferable reading skills and strategies most students need essential language skills. Therefore, our focus in class is turning towards small group collaborative work. In order to extend the opportunities for such collaborative work beyond the classroom time/space paradigm we are designing a virtual learning environment where students will be able to upload their texts in digital format, have direct access to online dictionaries, glossaries, thesauri as well as other available tools.

            At the end of the course, these annotated documents will be validated by the teacher and deposited in an online searchable database for the benefit of the next generations of students on the course. Such a database can also be shared among a number of participating institutions who will be able to use it and contribute to it.