CercleS – News


On this site you will find the latest news that we would like to communicate to our members. For details about projects with CercleS involvement please see below. Please also refer to the events and the elections pages.

 

10th CercleS International Conference
The 10th CercleS International Conference, hosted by the Language Centre of the University of Seville, Spain, took place from 18 to 20 September 2008. Please visit the conference website for further information on the event.

Bulletin 24 is now available and has been posted to the members. Amongst many other interesting topics, the issue includes articles on the forthcoming 10th CercleS Conference in Seville, the AULC annual Conference and the Language Centre of the University of Perugia in Second Life. (September 2008)

The Proceedings from the 9th CercleS Conference, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany, 2006, edited by Thomas Vogel, Ray Satchell and Alžbeta Moravčíková, are now available at the price of 30 €. (September 2008)

The report on the CercleS ELP Translation Workshop, which took place at the University of Padua, Italy, in November 2007, is now available.

 

Projects

EXPLICS- Exploiting Internet Case Studies
The aim of the EXPLICS project is to improve language competence of students by preparing models of best-practice in how to exploit Internet case study and simulation templates and by familiarising language teachers with these models. This is achieved by bringing together the different competence areas of the project partners. These specialisations include: task-oriented and problem-based learning and teaching; use of global simulations; use of case studies in language teaching; development of language level descriptors and methods of language testing, use of ICT for corpus analysis and concordancing and the use of ICT for language testing. We will then develop interrelated activities for subject-specific language teaching.

 

PICTURE Project
CercleS was also involved in the PICTURE (Portfolio Intercultural Communication - Towards Using Real Experiences) project, which was initiated in November 2004, and ran for approximately three years. This project was supported by SOCRATES and coordinated by Cor Koster. It had two aims: first, to develop a language teaching module on aspects of intercultural communication; second, to produce a questionnaire that could be used by students to carry out interviews with foreign language speakers.

 

Lingu@net Europa PLUS: Expanding the virtual languages resource centre
Lingu@net Europa PLUS project builds on Lingu@net Europa, the virtual languages resource centre (www.linguanet-europa.org) developped with Socrates / Leonardo support (1998-2001), and is coordinated by CILT. The objectives of Lingu@net Europa PLUS are: first, to make it easier for adult learners throughout the EU to gain access to relevant, good quality on-line language learning resources; second, to open Lingu@net Europa up to thousands of new users by adding 11 new access languages.

 

LATE Project
The LATE (Language Audits - Tools for Europe) project, which was initiated in November 2001 and ran for approximately three years, ended in June 2004. The participants in this project were 16 organisations in seven countries. CercleS' task, as a partner, was to monitor and evaluate the products and to ensure compliance with quality objectives. The project has recently led to two publications, as reported on in Bulletin 18, pp.8-9.

 

ENLU- Creating A New European Network
ENLU is one of seven projects selected in the frame of the European Commission’s Call for proposals EAC/45/03, issued in preparation of the Action Plan Promoting language learning and linguistic diversity.The main objective of the two-year project is to create a trans-European network of higher education institutions and other stakeholder organisations with a view to achieving a breakthrough in the area of “languages for all”. The project is carried out under the auspices of the Conseil Européen pour les Langues / European Language Council (CEL/ELC), which has been engaged in language policy development and in European projects since it was founded in 1997. The project represents a response to the linguistic and cultural challenges posed by thecreation of a European higher education area and a European research area and by the Lisbon Strategy.