29/05/2012 - Conference - Towards a More Specialised European Framework for (Self-)Assessing Language Competencies
The Metropolitan University as the coordinator of the Grundtvig project “Towards a more Specialized European Framework for (Self-)Assessing Language Competencies”, grant number: 10-Pk-GRU-007, organized an international conference to conclude the above mentioned project in Prague on May 29, 2012.The presenters were from Metropolitan University, Technická univerzita in Košice, Slovakia and the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest, Romania. The latter two mentioned institutions were the project partners.
The aim of the conference was to disseminate the project results and activities within both the partner institutions and wider academic community. Wider academic community included educational staff, students, education institutions, curriculum designers etc.
The conference papers and presentations were carried out in three languages, English, German and French. The project investigators focused on two language skill categories: the productive skill of writing within academic English and business English and the receptive skill reading a specialized text in German. The conference confirmed that the project’s practical value lies in its formulation of descriptors for the assessment of the above competencies, hitherto absent from a Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, due to its comprehensive nature.
The conference presenters dealt, both theoretically and empirically, with the above mentioned specialized language writing and reading skills in students of non-philological disciplines, familiarized the conference participants with research results and proposed formulations of specialized language learning descriptors. The conference proved that not only can professional language teachers apply these to their pedagogical activities, but students can also draw on them for their own self-evaluation.