This article presents and discusses views on grammar and its role in formal language learning amongst Finnish university students. The results are based on a questionnaire which was distributed to students at the University of Jyväskylä as part of institutional action research. The background to the project was a feeling amongst some teachers of…

Elective language courses, particularly those starting from the beginner level, constitute their own special group within the communication and language course offerings of universities. The elementary courses of less commonly taught languages (LCTL), such as Japanese, provide students with the opportunity to acquire, among other benefits, a…

With an increasing emphasis on measuring the outcomes of learning in higher education, assessment is gaining an ever more prominent role in curriculum design and development as well as in instructional practices. In formative assessment, feedback is regarded as a powerful pedagogical tool driving student engagement and deep learning. The efficacy…

This paper reports the steps taken to develop the conceptual framework of the MAGICC project (2013), which aimed to provide action-oriented descriptions of multilingual and multicultural academic and professional communication competence, instructional designs to promote these in higher education language teaching, and multidimensional forms of…

The Intercultural Product Pitch OIL (Online International Learning) Project set out to broaden the international experience for a small cohort of undergraduate students by enabling them to collaborate on a series of activities that would raise intercultural awareness and improve key communication skills. The project involved collaboration between…

This study investigates tourism undergraduates' perceptions of learning engagement and oral communication in English through their experiences of testing a pilot purpose-designed educational digital game. Reflecting the implementation of digitalization strategy in universities of applied sciences in Finland, it examines whether single instances of…

This article discusses some practical ideas associated with a pilot intercultural telecollaboration project. The aim of the project was to connect students from five countries: Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Poland and Spain, and to make them interact using social media, such as Facebook, Skype, Google Hangouts, etc. There were success stories…

In language learning today, students from different geographical locations are able to interact online in a more authentic environment, share their views with their partners, create profiles as well as build online communities enjoying common interests. With this in mind, this paper examines and reports on a study about how students from two…

To meet the demands of today's society and working life, higher education should support the development of learner agency. How the agency of individual learners emerges in university courses and what kind of agency empowers the learners to face new challenges should be considered. In this article, the focus is on learner agency enabled and…

Despite the proliferation of social media, few learners make effective use of digital technology to support their learning or graduate with the skills necessary for developing and communicating their expertise in the knowledge-driven networked society of the digital age. This article makes use of the concept of Personal Learning Environments (PLE)…

Within the European TILA project a case study was carried out where pupils from schools in Finland and the Netherlands engaged in debating sessions using the 3D virtual world of OpenSim once a week for a period of 5 weeks. The case study had two main objectives: (1) to study the impact that the discussion tasks undertaken in a virtual environment…

In a classical instructed language classroom setting, the practicing of communication situations is too often limited to producing isolated phrases and sentences without actually testing their relevance for the intended action. An example is describing and finding a route. In this paper, results of the early pilots with a collaborative virtual…

This paper offers insight into learning Slovak in an e-learning environment. The need to reach distance-learners of Slovak led to the implementation of a web-based course on Slovak language and culture in 2008-2010. The pedagogical basis of the course, called Virtual Slovak, is the socioconstructivist approach to teaching and learning, in which…