Cross-linguistic and Intercultural Mediation - German as a Lingua Franca

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In this innovative new micro-programme, students apply academic theory into practice in a community context, exchange perspectives on mediation. The most important goal of mediation is the understanding of communication partners who come from different or similar cultures and speak different mother tongues, so that interaction takes place both, interlingually and interpersonally. Seize this fantastic opportunity now and add a multi-faceted international dimension to your study profile by receiving an official certificate!

This CIVIS micro-programme is only open to students of the following organising universities:

  • National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
  • Sapienza Università di Roma
  • University of Bucharest
  • Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
  • University Tübingen

This micro-programme is structured as follows: The preparation will take place at the home universities of the students. The preparation section includes meetings and reading assignments: It starts with a warming-up meeting and a brief description of the project and the time plan. Furthermore, it comes with an introduction to the subject of linguistic and intercultural mediation. Therefore, the students have to search themselves for various primary literature about the concept of linguistic and intercultural mediation focusing on the specific cultural approaches in order to reflect on the concept of mediation. The final step focuses on the elaboration of proper definitions concerning mediation by discussing and comparing various approaches in the literature.

The main part is an online 2-day-joint-workshop with all participants divided into 6 sessions (90 minutes each). The first one is dedicated to establishing contacts, breaking down language barriers and getting to know each other. With the help of performative methods involving cultural rituals, participants will be sensitized to the use of different linguistic registers. Furthermore, the theoretical framework of language mediation will be developed in heterogeneous and multicultural groups after a joint brainstorming session and then compared in plenary with established definitions from the primary literature. The goal here is to find a definition of language mediation that is acceptable to all participants, which will serve as the basis for the rest of the workshop. In session 2 mediation items will be analyzed through German as foreign language books and language certificates. The first day closes with session 3, where the question of “understandable language” will be pointed out. The second workshop day starts with sessions 4 and 5, concerning variations of the German language from a sociolinguistic perspective. Furthermore, the main issues will be speech acts and interculturality. Session 6 rounds off this workshop experience by introducing the intralingual mediation for specific target groups, meaning mediation from German into German.

In the whole process, German native-speaking students support the L2 learners as tutors and document the achievement of communicative goals.

The German language is, moreover, the lingua franca in which the workshop will be held:

  • What is cultural and linguistic mediation?
  • How will cultural and linguistic mediation be integrated:
    • in German as a Second and Foreign Language workshops?
    • in German as a Second and Foreign Language teaching setting?

By means of concrete authentic texts, students are familiarized with the specificities of cultural and linguistic mediation in different communicative situations. The overarching scientific objective of CIVIS VM is to enable participants to train as future multipliers in order to

  • Teach foreign language teachers the importance of cultural and linguistic mediation;
  • Enable foreign language teachers, to integrate their own cultural and linguistic mediation into their teachings;
  • Present decision-makers (universities, language politicians...) in form of best practice settings, that lead to the integration of cultural and linguistic mediation into everyday teaching.

The aim of this project is as well to compare the diverse or equal outputs from a range of different “language-pairs”-combinations. Besides, we are focusing on different learner profiles while adapting a diversity of methods.

This micro-programme is open to Bachelor's and Master's students at all CIVIS universities.

This micro-programme is equivalent to 5 ECTS:

  • Synchrone working load: 25 hours
  • Asynchrone working load: 100 hours (individual study, research, preparing weekly tasks, communication with professors/students, creating final outputs)

The recognition of ECTS credit points is at the discretion of each home university.

Are you interested in the workshop Cross-linguistic and Intercultural Mediation - German as a Lingua Franca?

Your German level should be minimum at A2.1.

Send your application (motivation letter and a brief bio, if possible in German) to the below-listed contact of your University.

If your University is not listed below, you can send your application to achita@gs.uoa.gr.

Deadline: 15 May 2022.

Responses will be sent by 22 May 2022.

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens 

Sapienza Università di Roma

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

University of Bucharest

Universität Tübingen