The Centre for Foreign Language Teaching: Promoting multilingualism in a monolingual university 

The Centre for Foreign Language Teaching (CFLT) is an Academic Unit of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki with long experience in the provision of language courses for Specific Purposes (English, German, French, Italian). Aiming to expand the range of languages and courses offered, the CFLT started providing courses in Russian and Turkish and aspires to further broaden the range of language options so as to allow university students to choose among languages such as Chinese and Polish. Recently, the CFLT has also started to offer academic language courses for students leaving on an Erasmus exchange study visit or for students aiming to continue their studies abroad. Such pilot courses have been running for nearly two years now with great success.

The workshop aims to present the multi-faceted work carried out at the Centre which has recently broadened its scope and focuses on three major areas: (a) the teaching of languages for specific purposes, (b) the teaching of other languages as L2, and (c) the teaching of academic language for specific groups of students. This range and variety of courses aims to promote and disseminate multilingualism within the monolingual academic context since Greek is the dominant language of instruction in nearly all university faculties and schools. The participants of the workshop are instructors of various languages and language courses in the CFLT and their presentations are going to highlight aspects of their methodological choices and their impact on students’ skill development and strategy use.

Participants include among others the following CFLT instructors: Tania Maglavera, Kleopatra Kontouli, Smaro Christidou, Eleni Papadaki, Eleni Gkinou, Panagiota Poppoti.