UA68/7/1 Gaceta Cultural de WKU, Vol. 1, No. 1

Newsletter in Spanish regarding Spanish professors, Hispanic cultural events, churches and restaurants in Bowling Green

‘German in the World’

A report from the One-day Symposium hosted by the Institute of Modern Languages Research, Senate House, University of London. Monday 2 June, 2014

Valuing All Languages in Europe

The VALEUR project (2004-2007) took as its focus the 'additional' languages of Europe. These are defined as all languages in use in contexts where they are not 'national', 'official', or 'dominant' languages. They include 'migrant' languages, 'regional/minority' languages, sign languages and 'non-territorial' languages of diasporas such as Yiddish and Romani. The project team brought together a range of expertise in sociolinguistics and language pedagogy, planning and research from Finland, Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK. We took as our starting point Council of Europe policies on plurilingualism and the desirability of promoting linguistic diversity both for individual citizenship and for social cohesion in Europe. Our aim was to map provision for additional languages in Europe, in a more systematic and inclusive way than ever before. We looked at provision at school level for different languages in different contexts in order to identify good practices to be shared. In order to achieve our objectives we drew on the good will and enthusiasm of workshop participants, who provided a wealth of information and insights from 21 of the Council of Europe member states. Our work is not definitive: its purpose is awareness-raising and to stimulate further activity to support the learning of all Europe's languages

The modern programming languages

В статье описываются наиболее известные языки программирования, рассматриваются их особенности и сферы применения. Такая профессия как программист сегодня является весьма востребованной: навыки программирования пользуются высоким спросом, а должность программиста хорошо оплачивается. Из данной научной статьи читатели смогут выделить достоинства и недостатки представленных языков и, возможно, выбрать самый подходящий для изучения

La Voz

LA VOZ is published by the Modern Languages & Literatures Department, Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA

Internationalisation and modern languages in Scottish Further and Higher Education

This scoping study investigated the impact of internationalisation strategies on modern language provision in Scottish further and higher education and was commissioned by the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies. It follows on from the report by Footitt (2005), which explored issues of internationalisation and modern languages in England. The present investigation had the following aims: to identify the main policy documents related to internationalisation strategies and modern languages in Scottish further and higher education and explore to which extent internationalisation initiatives support or encourage the development of students' language and to explore the explicit and implicit messages given by institutional websites about international student support and about modern language study; to explore the views of selected stakeholders in Scottish further and higher education with regard to internationalisation strategies and in what ways international activities at selected institutions offer opportunities for language learning

The use of ICT in the assessment of modern languages: the English context and European viewpoints

The ever increasing explosion of highly attractive multimedia resources on offer has boosted the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in the teaching and learning of modern languages. The use of ICT to assess languages is less frequent, however, although online testing is starting to develop. This paper examines the national context for the assessment of modern foreign language proficiency in England, outlines the kinds of assessment currently available and the development of electronic forms of assessment and compares the above with the survey results of a European Union (EU) funded project on current good practice in online assessment of languages in other European countries. The findings indicate that speaking is inadequately served by online testing as tests currently focus primarily on receptive language skills. The implications for future successful online testing include the incorporation of interactive skills and effective formative feedback

Simulation for competition of languages with an ageing sexual population

Recently, individual-based models originally used for biological purposes revealed interesting insights into processes of the competition of languages. Within this new field of population dynamics a model considering sexual populations with ageing is presented. The agents are situated on a lattice and each one speaks one of two languages or both. The stability and quantitative structure of an interface between two regions, initially speaking different languages, is studied. We find that individuals speaking both languages do not prefer any of these regions and have a different age structure than individuals speaking only one language.Comment: submitted to International Journal of Modern Physics