Another win for SALIS

A three-member team from SALIS has won a European Commission-sponsored award which was open to all sectors and levels of education for 'innovative language teaching and learning'. The Linguistics Institute of Ireland, the awarding body, presented six prizes this year specifically for creative language teaching projects and DCU's submission on Business Ethics received one of them.

The project submittted by Claire Bohan, Juliette Péchenart and Julio Sanz of SALIS took a creative look at the way Business Ethics, a core module, is taught to fourth year students on the International Business and International Marketing degree programmes. The course was offered for the first time in 1999/2000 and it is original in that it not only focuses on the development of the student's language skills but also examines business ethics in Ireland and in the world at large. The foreign language is used as a 'medium' for learning about a subject area, rather then as a goal in itself. For non-specialists, this means that the students draw upon and re-activate their previous knowledge of the foreign language and learn new vocabulary related to the topics as they are discussed. This is a new development in SALIS and highlights their dedication to innovation and spearheading developments in language learning.

The Commission's recommendation that projects "be selected every year on the basis that they show effectiveness and originality and can offer quidance to those teaching and learning languages in different settings" highlights, once again, the level of excellence in SALIS.

The award will be formally presented by the Minister of Education, Dr Michael Woods, during the summer semester.