Spanish for fïeldwork

The project Spanish for fieldwork has shown that it is possible both to identify the right teaching competences for and attract students across the university for an intensive, functionally-oriented language course with very positive learning outcomes for the participants. The success of the course mainly relied on the following two steps implemented before the course started:

1. A procedure for uncovering and handling differences in the students’ language proficiency in relation the desired learning outcomes.
2. A method for planning the teaching activities based on a needs analysis of the communicative situations that the students expected to encounter.

The value of the project lies in the development of a fairly inexpensive method for identifying the individual needs of the participants both in regard to their language proficiency and the functions they need the language for. This method will be of great value in the planning of future intensive language courses at the university, in particular in relation to courses targeting other foreign languages than English. A number of other projects under the Language Strategy suggest that it is necessary to work with more differentiation in teaching other foreign languages than English.