We offer a culture-integrated curriculum to help our learners develop the necessary intercultural communicative competence. Engaging with authentic materials, from literary texts and the visual arts, films, songs and newspaper articles, to blogs, social media and culinary workshops, our students learn to reflect on the values in other communities and societies, comparing them with their own.
Our multilingual and multicultural language teachers are ideally placed to critically discuss commonalities and differences, and to develop the critical self-awareness that is necessary in fruitful global interactions. For us, Intercultural Communicative Competence is reflected not only in intercultural knowledge, but also in attitudes and behaviour.
In their third year, our students usually go abroad to work or study where the target language or languages are spoken. Careful cultural and linguistic preparation for the residence abroad and in-depth follow-up discussions after the experience are integral parts of our teaching. You can listen here to some reports from students talking about their year abroad.
Our approach helps students reflect on their own cultural and linguistic perceptions so that they are ready to engage with new cultures in their studies and in their everyday life abroad. Topics include appropriate small talk, taboo subjects, regional differences, education systems, administration abroad, differences in direct and indirect communication, and more.
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