7th Bremen Symposium 2019 - Overview

RETHINKING THE LANGUAGE LEARNER

Paradigms - Methods - Disciplines

Thursday February 28 to Saturday March 2, 2019
at the University of Bremen

All areas of our society are currently being affected by radical changes and developments. Globalisation, demographic change, and the ever-increasing digitalisation of the world of work and life in general mean that knowledge and the imparting of knowledge have constantly to be re-adapted to these fast-moving changes. Rapidly increasing internationalisation, enhanced heterogeneity and diversity, in conjunction with course schedules which are being streamlined more and more require language learning and teaching at our universities to adopt a new approach. Language centres are therefore faced with the challenge of realigning their language courses and concepts to changed learners, new learning cultures and new ways of learning. This equally has an impact on the work, training and education of teachers and students alike.

The 7th Bremen Symposium would like to offer a platform to examine this dichotomy from the point of view of language teaching and language learning research and the reference disciplines, to highlight the access afforded by interdisciplinary considerations and thereby place the focus on the learners. This requires foreign language teaching at universities to intermesh with related disciplines such as neurolinguistics and neurodidactics, and it should also take on board concepts from plurilingual didactics, translanguaging and language awareness. The symposium also wishes to highlight how such concepts can be implemented from a practical point of view in curricula and classrooms in general.  

Hosting institutions

Fremdsprachenzentrum der Hochschulen im Land Bremen (FZHB) in cooperation with the Association of language centres, language teaching institutes and institutes of foreign languages at German universities (AKS).

Registration

Opens September 1, 2018.

ORGANISING team

Prof. Dr. Claudia Harsch
Dr. Anikó Brand
Dr. Astrid Buschmann-Göbels
Katrina Stollmann, M.A.

Contact

Dr. Anikó Brandt
University of Bremen / Fremdsprachenzentrum der Hochschulen im Land Bremen (FZHB)
Universitäts-Boulevard 13
28359 Bremen, Germany

Tel.: +49 (0)421-218-61993
symposion@uni-bremen.de

Dr. Christina Gkonou, University of Essex

PD Dr. habil Marion Grein, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz