Project conducted by the University of Teacher Education Lucerne (PH Luzern) This project examined how teaching foreign languages advances – or can advance – (inter-)cultural competence and the reflection of transcultural elements as defined by ELBE. The project focused on the theme of food/eating culture and possible ways of exploring this topic when teaching a second Swiss national language at the secondary level I.

Despite the acknowledged benefit of language (and cultural) exchange at all school levels, the promotion of this instrument has had limited impact on exchanges actually conducted. The organisation and preparation of exchange and contact opportunities requires a considerable amount of extra work on the part of teachers; for them to consent to taking on such an effort, strong convictions and high motivation as well as institutional support are required.

The aim of the current project it to evaluate the learning impact of an age-appropriate, feasible exchange setting (two short, direct interactions embedded in contact via e-mail and video) at the primary level in Eastern and Western Switzerland. The focus is placed on the motivation to learn a foreign language as well as on changes in the productive language skills of the school children.

In the project “Multilingual Production by Children and Professionals in Playgroups” (Mehrsprachige Praktiken von Kindern und Fachpersonen in Spielgruppen, MePraS) a typology of multilingual practices will be developed and the conditions for successful production will be specified. Taking a focussed ethnographic or “videographic” approach, the everyday communicative productions in four playgroups with an average to high percentage of multilingual children will be examined. ...

This project aims at documenting and discussing the conditions for implementing bilingual teaching at primary school level based on two main issues:

This project aimed to gain empirical knowledge about how learners deal with multilingual teaching approaches in the foreign language classroom and to acquire a better understanding of the potential and the functioning of different types of multilingual teaching activities.

If the aim is to measure how well learners can actually use a foreign language, then competence-oriented testing with near-authentic tasks is the method of choice. There is, however, a need for renewal in the design of such test tasks, especially because real-world language use often uses electronic channels. Chat, Internet searches and the like are part of everyday life. In addition, computer-based testing has increasingly become the norm in recent years, especially in the field of...