Academic and pedagogical benefits

Best practice

The pilot projects under Language Strategy have striven to find the most effective solutions to language needs in local academic contexts, but many of the projects have also yielded experiences that can be used as best practice examples across the University. The following links contain more information about four specific best practice examples:

• Spanish for fieldwork
• Ancient Greek
• Reading proficiency in English
• Academic writing at Biochemistry

Cooperation between content and language teachers

The dialogue and cooperation between content and language teachers have been essential to the quality and sustainability of the various language-related projects.

The dialogue has given content teachers an opportunity to express in words what their students need in terms of linguistic competence development, but also what they themselves need to support students through this process. The cooperation has also often resulted in mutual competence development of content and language teachers through the joint development of language-support activities, teaching of courses and knowledge sharing in the form of conference presentations and publications.

This cooperation – often over a several semesters – has the potential to be utilized in more systematic language-related competence development of content teachers in the form of teacher training courses at Copenhagen University. This is the case when it comes to improving students’ reading skills across a range of foreign languages and especially their written academic English. The Language Strategy has gained valuable experiences in these areas across numerous academic contexts.