Two in one go

A boost for multilingualism through multilingual courses at university language centers

Abstract

As an active agent in multilingualism, language centers in higher education aim to promote a wide variety of languages, including frequently studied languages as English or Spanish, but also smaller languages. For the summer semester 2023, a bilingual language offer was developed to contribute to the selection of courses for lesser learned languages. Inspired by Małgorzata Müller's modern approach in her textbooks ”Ab in die Sprachen” (2020, 2021, 2023), two languages of the same language family will be taught within the same language course, in co-teaching mode. The comparative-additive approach allows accessing a wide variety of previously gathered knowledge when learning another language ​​from the same language family (Tafel et al. 2009: 49). The aim of this interim report on the language project in development is to draw more attention to alternative forms of multilingual teaching and to encourage other teachers to strive for similar offers with or without co-teaching.