6 ECTS credits
180 h study time
Offer 1 with catalog number 4021515ENR for all students in the 1st and 2nd semester at a (E) Master - advanced level.
Knowing how to communicate effectively in an increasingly multilingual and transcultural world can greatly benefit you in your personal, academic, and professional life. This course is dedicated to helping you develop your (multilingual) communicative skills, with a particular focus on making you harness these skills in a manner fitting to context, genre, audience, and/or communicative goal. The course also aims to equip you with theoretical insights that can help you to reflect critically on how you operate between languages, as well as on the challenges pertaining to communication in a multilingual society. Considering its status as the international (academic) lingua franca, English will be at the centre-stage of this course, but every other week class meetings will be devoted to exercises and activities where you will have to mediate between English and your language of choice, i.e. Arabic.
In practical terms, the course comprises two components:
1) Theory and English practice, consisting of
- theoretical issues relevant to the broad remit of ‘multilingual practices’
- practical exercises aimed to develop your speaking and writing skills in English
2) English-Arabic practice, entailing
- written and oral activities/exercises to practise and develop your mediating skills between English and Arabic.
As far as the theoretical components of the course are concerned, aspects that will be looked into include:
- Multilingualism, emotion and identity
- Multilingualism, codeswitching and translanguaging
- English as a lingua franca
- Multilingualism in the family
- Multilingualism in the public space
In the practical seminars devoted to English, you will be set a range of hands-on exercises and assignments aiming to hone your communicative skills in English.
In the seminars dedicated to English-Arabic, you will be set a variety of assignments involving the two languages, including translation (L1-L2; L2-L1), adaptation (e.g. translating while changing the medium, audience, goal, ..), revision, as well as interpreting in everyday contexts.
Any course materials used in class (powerpoint slides, print handouts, research articles) will be made available on the e-learning platform.
The student can communicate effectively in a medium that is conscious of and adapted to context, genre, audience, and communicative goal(s).
The student can write, adapt, or edit English texts that are conscious of and appropriate to context, genre, audience, and communicative goal(s).
The student can successfully operate and mediate between English and the chosen target language in both speech and writing in everyday and academic contexts.
The student can critically reflect on how he or she operates between languages in a given context or genre, for a given audience, to achieve (a) certain communicative goal(s). To this end, he or she applies insights from research as well as lived experience. He or she can communicate these insights clearly and appropriately in speech or in writing, in English as well as in the chosen target language.
The final grade is composed based on the following categories:
Oral Exam determines 30% of the final mark.
Other Exam determines 70% of the final mark.
Within the Oral Exam category, the following assignments need to be completed:
Within the Other Exam category, the following assignments need to be completed:
In the course of the academic year, you will be set a range of writing and speaking assignments, individually, in pairs, and/or in groups. These assignments may be set during class or as homework. You may receive feedback (and/or a mark) on your assignments during class, via email, or upon appointment, either in the course of the semester or upon completion of the course. At the end of the semester, you will compile all these assignments into a portfolio. For both the English and English-Arabic part of the course, the mark you obtain will be based on the assessment of your portfolio (70%), as well as on an oral exam (30%).
In the second exam session, an alternative set of portfolio assignments will be given.
This offer is part of the following study plans:
Master of Linguistics and Literary Studies: Profile Multilingual Mediation and Communication - 2 languages