The urgency for education to participate in the plan of action of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SD) poses challenges to language education in university language centers. This paper discusses the potential of Higher Education (HE) language center courses to provide students with the knowledge and skills of inclusive, respectful,…

The study explores Finnish compulsory school language teachers' formative and summative assessment practices. It aims at finding out what formative and summative assessment modes and tools the teachers use and what kind of evidence they collect for students' final grades. The data were gathered through questionnaires administered in national…

Increase in diversified teaching contexts has led researchers to investigate the potentials of telecollaboration in multicultural learning environments. While there are abundant telecollaboration studies, improving intercultural awareness through a theoretical model is usually under-investigated. Based on Byram's (1997) co-orientational and…

This project was conducted in a five credit course in English as a Foreign Language, which was a compulsory module in first year business administration studies. The data includes students' learning diaries and a post-course online questionnaire (N=21). The data were analysed using a content analysis method. The results indicate that the students…

Recently, in the wake of the Bologna Declaration and similar international initiatives, there has been a rapid increase in the number of university courses and programmes taught through the medium of English. Surveys have consistently shown the Nordic countries to be at the forefront of this trend towards English-medium instruction (EMI). In this…

This activity report describes a sample unit (Effective Data Presentation) from a communication course prepared as part of an Intellectual Output within the BADGE Project, which was carried out by 12 partner universities from 10 countries during 3 academic years (2019-2022). The article first describes the results of a survey which show that…

This paper presents information on the factors affecting the development of multilingual and multicultural communicative competence in interactive multimodal learning environments in an academic context. The interdisciplinary course in multilingual interaction offered at the University of Jyväskylä aims to enhance students' competence in…

Despite abundant research on educational technology and strategic input in the field, various surveys have shown that (language) teachers do not seem to embrace in their teaching the full potential of information and communication technology available in our everyday life. Language students soon entering the professional field could accelerate the…

This article focuses on the learning affordances of different language and communication curricula in the world. For reasons of space, only two national education systems (Finland and Singapore) and their language and communication curricula are referred to. The accounts of national education systems consist of the identification of mechanisms…

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…

The changes facing industries are necessitating a concomitant change in university curriculum. Before instigating a reform, however, education providers need to acquire an understanding of the most pertinent development needs essential for filling industrial competence gaps. The Language Centre at the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland…