EU projects DIVIS and Speech Bubbles

Our EU partner project “Fasten Seatbelts to the World” (http://www.fastenseatbelts.eu) is on the Berlin underground televisions from this weekend.

Not properly introduced yet and not without faults but this might be something useful on the long run. And what works now already is an automatic timing feature, where your titles will come up at the right moment without you putting them on the track:

If you live in the UK (and if you are between 13 and 21 - check this out.

The current DIVIS newsletter is available here. Please pass it on to your colleagues.

There is a new 30 minute broadcast coming to support the European Day of Languages 2009. The programme will be broadcast on the 26th September at 11.00 hrs in the Berlin television network. There will be a livestream taking place at the same time which can be found on www.alex-berlin.de.

DIVIS at the conference Edulearn 09 in Barcelona: A presentation from Dolors Masats and Melinda Dooly. Go here for the paper and powerpoint.

The Commission has granted two new video courses for languages teachers both in October 2010 and 2011 for teachers across Europe (but according to the rules not from Germany).  You find the details in the course web. Please pass this info on to your colleagues.

Check out an interesting conference “Languages and intercultural Dialogue in Sport” in Trieste on the 16th and 17th October 2009. You find more information about this conference here.

Pickung up on the Speech Bubbles project idea and extending the idea of presenting words in a foreign language you find here a new clip from a school in Maastricht with a few words in Dutch and Italian and also a short introduction in both. More about the current video language development also on divisproject.eu.

Multilingualism, Regional & Minority Languages: Paradigms for ‘Languages of the Wider World’

International conference at the SOAS this week: (16th/17th April 2009)

This international conference is organised jointly by the Languages of the Wider World CETL (LWW CETL) at SOAS and UCL in the UK, and the MERCATOR European Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning at the Fryske Akademy in the Netherlands.

All people have the right to learn and use their mother-tongue, and to learn a second and third language. This formal right is often absent and its use in practice is often less well guaranteed and less developed than should be the case, especially for speakers of smaller languages variously labelled as ‘regional’, ‘minority’, ‘immigrant’, ‘community’ (including sign languages), ‘heritage’ languages, etc. The conference will focus on theoretical and empirical work in research and implementation of teaching and learning models and strategies for language learning.

More here.