10. Need for other languages than English/Danish

With this part of the language policy, the university is stating that not only Danish and English, but also a number of other languages may be relevant for students in their study activities, mobility plans, and future employability. The use of English and other languages is connected to the internationalisation of the university in many ways. Firstly, language competence opens up more opportunities for student exchanges, internships, and fieldwork abroad. Secondly, in the international labour market, language competence is an obvious advantage and even a required skill in certain professional domains. Thirdly, internationalisation of the curriculum is established through allowing access to textbooks, source material, and empirical cases available in other languages than Danish and English. Thus, in some degree programmes, the use of languages beyond Danish and English is part of the study tradition and considered a sign of high quality. Importantly, this does not only apply to language students as such, but also to students across a wide range of disciplines.

There is no ‘one size fits all’ with respect to the language needs of students. These diverse needs stem from the students having varying degrees of motivation to develop their language competences, and the priorities given to specific skills (i.e., reading, writing, speaking, listening). For some students and in some programmes, only Danish and English are relevant. For other students, additional languages may either support already existing study activities or add an international dimension to the students’ studies and their preparedness for the international labour market. In many cases, reading is the main skill needed, but for international exchanges and fieldwork abroad, speaking is often more important. Furthermore, the list of languages that may potentially be relevant for students at the university includes modern languages as well as classical languages, and European as well as non-European languages.

Given that many languages are potentially relevant for students, it will be useful for all faculties at the University of Copenhagen to establish an overview of student language needs through needs analyses of various kinds (e.g., surveys, interviews, study diaries). The identification of language needs as experienced by students, either in their current studies or in relation to future jobs, student counsellors or representatives of study programmes can be used to promote student mobility to non-Anglophone countries or to support students’ access to textbooks and source material in the languages that are academically relevant for their specific subject areas.

The language consultants at CIP can offer different kinds of needs analyses and will be able to provide assistance to faculties who wish to get an overview of student needs for learning different languages. CIP’s language consultants are also able to provide different models for integrating content and language at university level and will be able to support the development and implementation of faculty-wide courses as well as programme-specific courses based on specific curricula. Examples of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) courses, as well as various types of needs analyses at faculty or programme level, can be found here.