CIP symposium 2011

Thursday 10 November 2011 CIP's fourth annual symposium was held. This year's symposium focused on languages for academic purposes and student needs.

Again this year, CIP's Symposium offered a high attendance with representatives from Norway, Sweden, Iceland and several universities in Denmark.

The director of CIP, Birgit Henriksen, began the symposium by welcoming everyone after which the first speaker Auður Hauksdóttir took over with her presentation "How do Icelandic students cope in Danish during higher education in Denmark". The project results were a product of extensive questionnaire surveys and qualitative interviews and referred to the Icelandic students needs for Danish language skills and their use of these.

After the first part of the symposium, the guests were offered sandwiches, coffee and tea. The second part of the symposium was kicked off by Henrik Friis from LIFE, Sophie Swerts Knudsen and Pete Westbrook from CIP who talked about their collaborative project "A Good Education: Preparing LIFE student for English-medium instruction". They talked about the background of the project and the results in connection with a workshop that gave the students instruments to handle English-medium instruction better. After this talk, Sanne Larsen took over and presented her PhD project "Writing in English for Academic purposes: International Students' Experiences". The presentation was about the challenges six international students' met in relation to academic writing in English.

The second part of the symposium ended and the guests were offered coffee and cake. The third and last part of the symposium was rounded off by the Swedish professor in bilingualism Kenneth Hyltenstam and his presentation "Advanced second language proficiency - why "near-native" - why not "native-like"?" which was about when a person can be perceived as a native speaker. The symposium was concluded by Anne Holmen, the first professor at CIP, who summed up on the presentations and the many questions asked during the day and thanked the audience for a successful event. Anne Holmen takes over as director of the centre 1 January 2012.