Last week I was invited to a conference in Romania. Beside some valuable intercultural experience that I could make, the 2-hours trip back to the airport which I spent in a cab was very interesting, because it showed me that there is still a lot to do in the development of self-teaching material. I had bought myself a language guide “Last-Minute Romanian”. I had practically no knowledge of Romanian (and it is a Romanic language very different from the other Romanic languages I know). I had manage to do 12 of the 20 lessons, but they did not allow me to talk with the driver in an efficient (and sometimes not even in an effective) way.
The situations that had been covered by the lessons did not help me here.
The lessons presented only people who already know Romanian so that I had not learned sentences that mean “Slowlier, please” or “I don’t understand”.
I had not learned to produce an internationalism in Romanian.
The book included only a Romanian-German, but not a German-Romanian glossary. It was also interesting how the driver started to speak not proper Romanian, but “foreigner Romanian” or “telegramm Romanian”.
If we hadn’t been forced to be together for two hours (in his cab), then the conversation would soon have been over.
Today I completed two test versions “BGE for self-study”!!! Version 1 consists of an international main book in English + audio files and an accompanying book in German. Version 2 consists of a book especially for German learners.
These materials are now sent to various test persons, who should work with them and give me feedback by March 31.
2008 has been the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue. This was the reason that we started an international project on European communicative strategies in April. Researchers (professors and students from a broad range of European countries) have participated in this project over the past months and contributed to a 202-page long special issue of my Journal for EuroLinguistiX, which is now available via the ELiX homepage or directly here. This volume also includes
a basic European language guide (a synopsis of common European communicative strategies and equivalences of important sentences in different European languages)
Last week I was at the University of Innsbruck (Austria). I had been invited by Professor Wolfgang Pöckl for a guest lecture. Originally, all students wanted to buy my “EuroLinguistischer Parcours”, but unfortunately the publishing house is sold, because the owner has fallen seriously sick, and there were not enough book copies left. I’m currently looking for another publisher for a second edition of the book and hopefully also for an English edition. The students had been given a copy of a few chapters of the book and my talk was now to supplement the reading.
I was glad to hear that Professor Pöckl wanted a rather programmatic lecture. So the title that we both decided on was: “Goals and Ways of Applied Eurolinguistics in a Globalized World”.
After summarizing the basic competences for knowledge societies that we could deduce from best-selling books on socioeconomic history and development, I presented my ideas of how we should/could teach eurolinguistics and what kind of research questions we should/could focus on. Of course, I also introduced LdL, BGE and two of my student projects (at the moment, the outline of my presentation together with the links I used is still available on my Wikiversity site). I also tried to activate the students using questionnaires and inserting brief discussions; their professor afterwards told me that he was surprised how much the (normally shy) students actually participated in the brief discussions. Another professor told me immediately after my talk that her students said that they were inspired by the ideas presented and that they would like to talk about them in the following seminar session. Both professors told me that their students—all future interpreters and translators—normally ask for practical exercises in interpreting and translating and dislike too much “academic research”; but due to my talk, they said, students could see that doing research, if in some way connected to practical problems, is something that students should try out in present-day society and that it is something that can be fun. As a matter of fact, when I came back to my office in Eichstätt, there was already a mail by a student who wanted to add me to her network on xing.de and to exchange ideas on a thesis she is working on.
