Abstract
The School of Languages and Applied Linguistics at the Open University (OU) radically re-designed its modern languages curriculum in 2014, launching its first suite of new modules in 2017. The institution as a whole has since also developed a new employability framework. Our paper describes the principles underpinning the design of the new curriculum, demonstrates how it is being implemented, and focuses on an initiative that involved our Associate Lecturers (ALs) in defining a 'well-rounded graduate' and reflecting on plurilingualism and their roles as language teachers in a distance-teaching institution. Presenting our Teaching Excellence project, its processes, and findings in this paper will allow colleagues who teach modern languages to replicate or adapt parts of our approach in their own settings, exemplifying to the wider world how language skills can become an inherent element of the well-rounded graduate in the 21st century.
Highlights
And within Europe, the call for language competences as part of employability skills has become heard widely
Our key efforts to implement this went into the careful choice of learning materials and resources to support the approach, the systematic and explicit development of intercultural communication competence and non-subject-specific skills alongside the development of language-specific skills, and a pedagogic approach which supports the development of self-reflection in our students. It has become imperative for the languages sector to demonstrate the wide professional relevance of language learning to specialist students, and even more so to non-specialist ones, and to educate them in articulating the nuances of what language learning brings to them
The Open University (OU)’s new curriculum for modern languages has redefined the discipline as a holistic cluster of knowledge, skills, and attributes. It has achieved this by emphasising the intercultural communication competence dimension of language learning and developing a pedagogic approach which encourages self-reflection and explicit training in articulating one’s skills
Summary
And within Europe, the call for language competences as part of employability skills has become heard widely. Some Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have already responded by integrating language and employability more closely. Practitioners on the ground might fear that the latter comes with a loss of language competence, and, they might resist the change required in pedagogy to support it. Language teachers at tertiary level and, at secondary and even primary level, will need to be encouraged to buy into the new curriculum and its associated methods and content. The School of Languages and Applied Linguistics at the OU has revised their modern languages syllabus and curriculum considerably, following university strategic new priorities and responding to a changing higher education environment
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