Season's Greetings!
Masaryk University Language Centre traditionally donates finances usually used for printing Christmas cards to People In Need (https://www.clovekvtisni.cz/en/).
Play with Languages! Look back at the plurilingual summer school
Last week in July, Masaryk University Language Centre organised a unique summer school as part of an international project Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme which focused on plurilingual methods of education. The event called "International Communication: Play with Languages" hosted students from three European universities who participated in an online course throughout the spring semester.
During the intensive week, participants spoke in several languages and they tried the plurilingual education methods in practice. CJV lecturers formed two groups (called Mendel and Janáček) and presented creative activities aimed at for example idioms and metaphors across languages, pluricultural mediation, cultural and pluricultural patterns in literature, and more. Students also took part in a Czech class and they collectively wrapped up their busy week with a photo presentation about their experiences in Brno.
CJV organised this type of plurilingual summer school for the first time thanks to the Erasmus+ BIP project support with overwhelmingly positive feedback.
Here are examples of students' feedback:
"During the first day I was a bit overwhelmed and after a while, I felt safe to speak different languages and to actively listen to the ones I did not know before. I am more open, and I now want to learn Czech."
"I felt in the right place. It was so good to be able to practice other languages and hearing languages I can’t speak but surprisingly understand very well!"
"Changing languages while speaking, listening to one language and 5 seconds later to another, speaking in several languages myself is something that I thought would be hard (and which is hard for many many people !). But with this course, I realized I could easily switch from one language to another and even tho I know nothing in Czech, it was still easy for me to understand many many things just because of the things we learned in class, like how I can use my linguistic repertoire to figure out what a word could mean!"
"First, I learnt about Czech culture, language, etc... Then, this course really gave me the will to push forward and learn and or deepen my knowledge on the studied languages as it is enriching as a person but also for my future career."
"They were soooo nice and amazing I wish they could teach at my university. Like Daniella said, it was like our safe place since the professors were listening to us and we are not afraid to make mistakes."
(Have you gained anything personally?) "Confidence in my own plurilingual competence and how it can be developed. Discovering Brno, loving it more and more. Deeper knowledge and exchanges with the people I already knew, and new friends. I've also gained a lot of personal reflections and a really WONDERFUL experience."
"The way of teaching/learning that was used for this program is probably the best one because you developed a great interest in learning, even when it's a difficult language. I feel like it wasn't even "courses" since it was games and interactions and i' not used to this type of classes, but in the end, have learned a lot!"
