German university degrees, at least in some countries, offer students only German literature courses in addition to language courses. Linguistics is often not a core component of German degree programmes. As a result, students who are not familiar with basic linguistic terminology do not know how languages work, including their mother tongue, or…

The urgency for education to participate in the plan of action of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SD) poses challenges to language education in university language centers. This paper discusses the potential of Higher Education (HE) language center courses to provide students with the knowledge and skills of inclusive, respectful,…

The report presents the results of an experimentation of an intercomprehension (IC) workshop, delivered in blended mode for Italian and Brazilian PhD students, and activated at the Language Center of the University of Ferrara during the academic year 2021-22. The general objective was for participants to learn a methodology that enables…

This paper presents a case example of a University Pedagogy course module carried out in ALMS (Autonomous Learning Modules) format. The participants of the course were mainly in-service language teachers of the University of Helsinki Language Centre, and the author of this report is a module instructor and counsellor. The motivation for the ALMS…

This article reports on research that questions the existence and use of translingual practices in higher education. On the one hand, the increase of mobility in Tertiary Education leads to the presence of various individual repertoires in the classroom and, on the other hand, the use of scientific texts, usually published in English, is more and…

This paper discusses to what extent synchronous communication via Skype by Argentine university students of History and Danish university students of Spanish contributed to fostering intercultural competence in the two groups of participants. Intercultural gains are considered both as part of the planned tasks to be solved by the participants…

This article explains how the "Common European Framework of References for Languages" (CEFR; Council of Europe 2001, "Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) has been applied in language courses at the Language Centre (LC) of the Cyprus…

This article presents and analyses a classroom-based assessment method to test students' speaking skills in a variety of professional settings in tourism. The assessment system has been implemented in the Communication in English for Tourism course, as part of the Tourism Management degree programme, at Florida Universitaria (affiliated to the…

This article explores levels of proficiency in Chinese with reference to the new HSK (Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi) Chinese Proficiency Test and the "Common European Framework of Reference for Languages" (CEFR). Special attention is given to learning and teaching the writing of Chinese characters and the use of Pinyin, a phonetic Romanization…