About Us

Welcome!

The Language Learning (LL) team is one of four chair groups within the Department of European Language and Cultures (ELC) at the University of Groningen (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) – the others are Politics & Society, Language & Society, Culture & Literature. The LL team is formed by an amazing group of language teaching professionals who devote themselves to teaching excellent proficiency courses in a total of 8 different languages and their societies and cultures: Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.

As innovative and creative lecturers, we teach from absolute beginner levels to high proficiency academic language use. ELC proficiency courses merge language and culture education through implementing task-based pedagogy and content and language integrated (CLIL) methodology. A unique feature of our program is that we provide students with hours of multimodal language exposure through movies, the latest news, literature, series, tv-programmes, and social media – next to more traditional journalistic, literary and academic texts. Through these relevant cultural products students are not only immersed in the language but also learn a lot about the background knowledge necessary to fully understand the “whys” behind the “whats” of the language and culture they are studying. We see academic discourse and critical thinking as a key to form the future generation for an inclusive view of the world.

Besides the teaching activities, the LL team is actively involved in continuous professional development. We work hard to be in the front line of new trends in language education, and continuously adjust and re-develop our courses based on the newest insights from second language acquisition research. Every year, we contribute and participate in various (inter)national conferences. For example, in 2021, LL team members were actively involved in the organisation of the AILA World Congress and presented at the EuroSLA and Levende Talen conference. Also for the coming years, we aim to participate in Task-based Language Teaching, World CLIL, the ANéLA Congress as well as many local activities. This gives us the opportunity to inspire others and get inspired by colleagues.

The LL team is always engaging in new projects such as international collaborations with higher education institutions from all over the world (e.g., Lehramt International with Oldenburg University, Germany, and Nelson Mandela University, SA; EVOLVE about virtual exchange in Europe) and many local and internal cooperations between the different languages in our own ELC department. We also collaborate extensively with the Groningen University Teacher Education in modern foreign languages via the Expertisecentrum Vakdidactiek Noord. In this way, we continuously keep enriching the team and our own teaching.

An exciting project we are currently working on is this website itself which so far includes the task bank project from the LL team, hosts Je suis #profdeFLE podcasts from the French department, also hosts The CEFR in context podcasts from the LL team, and many more to come!