Designing a multilingual course to support second and third language acquisition

This paper reports on a multilingual course developed and taught at the University of Luxembourg Language Centre in 2015. The Language Centre offers academic language support in English, French and German across the universities three faculties, where most study programmes are bi- or trilingual.
The question of how to use existing multilingual resources and support the acquisition of multilingual competences has become increasingly important due to the Bologna agreement and internationalisation strategies at many European universities. However, while research on third language acquisition (Cenoz, Hufeisen, Jessner 2001; Hufeisen, Neuner 2003; Jessner 2008) and multilingualism in higher education (Jessner 2008, Hu 2015; Rindler Schjerve, Vetter 2012) is a common theme, little has been published that could guide language teachers in the design of multilingual courses. Teaching methods such as Intercomprehension with GALANET (Degache 1997) or Eurocom (Meissner 2004; Hufeisen, Marx 2007; Klein 2007) and European projects like CARAP (Candelier 2007) and MAGICC document the need for new concepts in language education very well.
Informed by the results of a university wide needs analysis of language competences at the University of Luxembourg, the Language Centre developed a trilingual presentation skills course (FR/EN/GE) for MA students to support second and third language acquisition. In this paper, we will present our course design, comment on the running of the course and present findings from our teaching and student course evaluations that can be used to inform the future teaching of multilingual courses. Our aim is to provide insights into how multilingual courses can be successfully designed and run.
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MAGICC http://www.unil.ch/magicc/home.html
GALANET, http://www.galanet.eu/