Comenius grant supports educational innovation with multilingual language teaching approach

Audrey Rousse-Malpat, Assistant Professor of language learning (European Languages and Cultures), has been awarded a Comenius Teaching Fellowship of € 50,000 for the project 'Speak your language(s)! A multilingual approach for students in a broad language programme'.

Language students from a Bachelor's programme in languages will recognise the problem: they would like to learn 'their' foreign language as well as possible, but most of the subjects in their language programme are in English. At the same time, they are supposed to reach a high level of proficiency in this foreign language during their Bachelor's degree.

A first
Rousse-Malpat's project can help with this by offering a group of second-year Bachelor's students a multilingual course in the coming academic year, in which they learn to understand each other's languages and cultural points of view, while they continue to develop their target language trough strategies such as language comparison, interpreting, and mutual understanding. A premier in a university!

"In this project, we are going to bring science to practice. The theory is there, but it has never been put into practice in higher education before. So we are really going to do something new. At the end of the project, we are going to see whether this form of multilingual education can also be applied in other beachlor studie", says Rousse-Malpat.

Comenius programme
The Comenius programme is an initiative of the National Regieorgaan Educational Research and contributes to the renewal and improvement of higher education in the Netherlands. The projects supported by a Comenius grant directly benefit students and give education professionals the opportunity to develop further in their careers.