This article presents two studies performed on 14 immigrant families with children aged one to 16; 12 families in Iceland and two Icelandic families living abroad. Lack of exposure and availability of online materials for learning Icelandic as an L2 may affect what skills children can practise at home. This study represents 32 children aged one to…

Many adult migrants lacking L2 linguistic autonomy cannot afford the time to master host countries' languages before providing for their basic needs. Thus, second language training that focuses on occupational integration is at times more urgent than a more generally social one, as the European 'language for work' approach suggests. Given the…

Working independently helps students develop a series of skills and strategies that will continue to be useful in their future professional careers. Teachers in Higher Education (HE) have a role in facilitating Independent Learning (IL) for their students. When creating opportunities for students to develop autonomy in learning, teachers may wish…

Studies investigating beginner Chinese learners' character learning strategies found that learners considered orthographic knowledge the most useful factor (Ke, 1998; Shen, 2005). Orthographic recognition correlates with character identification and production and can be used by advanced learners to solve word identification problems (Everson,…

This study explored Finnish students' perceptions of online language courses with the KiVAKO project (KiVAKO is an acronym in Finnish meaning strengthening the language capital at higher education institutions). The aim was to identify and make visible the aspects that need to be taken into account in designing an effective online language course.…

Learning and Reading Assistant (LARA) is an open source platform that enables conversion of plain texts into an interactive multimedia form designed to support second- and foreign-language (L2) learners. In this workshop, we illustrate the open source aspects using collaborative work carried out during a six-week summer project at the Árni…

'Web-based and Interactive Italian' is a detailed and progressive programme developed by the author for the Maastricht University Language Centre. The course started in 2013, with the intention of catering for the variability in the number of students following the regular courses, as well as broadening the language offer using blended learning.…

This article discusses the benefits of theatrical texts in language courses for beginners. These original, fun, and yet challenging materials help learners develop linguistic and intercultural competencies and transferable skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and cooperation. Specifically, this article examines the use of Jean…

The current challenges for languages in higher education may be summarised as: global and local socio-political changes; diversity of learners with different life-long and life-wide needs and wants; demands for effectiveness, accountability, and employability of our language provision; different modes of delivery at different times and forms; and…

The HERO project aims to develop a training program for caregivers to be working in the elderly care sector. The program is particularly addressed to caregivers from Middle Eastern and African countries as refugees and intends to help them integrate into European society. This paper seeks to offer an overview of the project, including its…

The education of intercultural competencies and the related skills are at the forefront of teaching at Debrecen University. The teaching materials are based on the work of esteemed authors like Hofstede, Hall, and Trompenaars. However, new cultural and social realities evolve, and educators of intercultural communication need to be responsive to…

We present enetCollect, a large European network project funded as a COST Action that sets ground for combining crowdsourcing with IT technologies used in areas such as language learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP). This project tackles a major challenge of bringing together interdisciplinary researchers to foster language learning of…

The Exercise, an Exercise generator in the SOURCe project, is a tool that complements the properties and functionalities of the SOURCe project, which includes the search engine for the Searchable Online French-Greek parallel corpus for the UniveRsity of Cyprus (SOURCe) (Kakoyianni-Doa & Tziafa, 2013), the PENCIL (an alignment tool)…

Interacting with peers can be difficult for some students, due to their personality as well as to their learning styles. This paper shows how the Task-Based Approach (TBA) can be implemented and how digital resources can be used in language teaching and learning to enhance the students' experience and foster autonomy. To do so, I describe tasks I…

This paper reports on a study that explored five student-teachers' beliefs regarding the usability of three digital flashcard websites that can be used in a blended learning approach in English Language Teaching (ELT) classrooms. These student-teachers, who had previous teaching experience, were students on a year-long Master of Arts (MA)…