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School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies Dublin City University Ireland Located in the capital city of the most globalised country in the world, Dublin City University offers a range of research programmes and courses of study which reflect that global dimension. Among the Schools offering such courses is the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies. The thematic focus of the School is ‘International
Communication’. In practice, this means working on ways of developing
and facilitating communication across frontiers, within Ireland itself, in
Europe and around the world. In its 20-year history, the School has taken
a radical approach to this area, creating new types of programmes of study
and contributing to the creation of new academic fields. The School has
not shied away from the challenge of delivering to its students the skills
and expertise that are needed in order for international communication to
happen in an effective and meaningful way. The result is a set of courses
which offer academic depth, practical communication skills and some
radical ways of coming to grips with a globalised and increasingly
internationalised world. The core ‘Languages’ degree offered by the School
is the BA
in Languages for International Communication. The programme on offer
in this case provides in-depth training in language skills in French,
German, Spanish and Japanese. From autumn 2004, an English option will be
added to the degree, so that foreign students may take a strand which
deepens their knowledge of English as a Foreign Language. Along with the
modules aimed at developing proficiency in these five languages, the
programme offers the student a range of modules on areas related to
language and communication. These include a core module on ‘Language,
culture and international communication’ in Year 1, optional modules in
science, business or communications in Year 2 and a choice of specialism
in Year 4. The three sepcialist areas on offer are Translation Studies,
Intercultural Studies and English/French/German/Hispanic Studies. Students
on this programme spend Year 3 abroad, with the exception of students
taking English as a Foreign Language, who, since they are already abroad
(in Ireland) take the degree over three years rather than the normal four. The undergraduate programme in Business + Languages
offered by the School is the BA
in International Business and Languages. Students take either one or
two languages on this programme, but combine study of that language with
the study of a wide range of business areas, offered by DCU Business
School. Again, students on this programme spend Year 3 at a foreign
university, studying Business subjects and undertaking work on the culture
of the country they are in. At postgraduate level, the School has recently expanded the range of the courses it offers, so that the list currently includes the following: - MA in Comparative Literature offering an in-depth
analysis of topics in this international
discipline offering an introduction to this exciting new academic area developing professional expertise in translation and related technologies Graduate
Diploma in Language and Intercultural Studies a modular course of
study ranging over all the above disciplines Research carried out by colleagues in SALIS ranges over a wide spectrum of themes and topics relating to the study of language and culture, from literary research to research in Intercultural Studies, from Computer Assisted Language Learning to the study of French, German and Spanish cinema. Increasingly, research is being conducted in collaborative groups, both within the School and involving individuals and departments from other universities. The Princip Project has been running for three years, involving collaborating universities from various European countries. The aim of this project is the realisation of a multilingual system for the detection of racist and revisionist documents on the Internet.. The Trasna Project, which, like the Princip Project, is based in the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies, aims at devising an online bibliography of Irish literature in translation from earliest times to the present. Preliminary evidence suggests that a considerable amount of translation of Irish literature has not been recorded.As the first ever comprehensive record of Irish literature in translation, TRASNA will be the basis for analysis and interpretation of the fortunes of Irish literature in the different languages of the world. The Intercultural Workplace Project is aimed at investigating the benefits and challenges posed by the increasingly intercultural working environment in today's Ireland. It focuses on the experience of three groupings: Management/ Employers; Im-/Migrant Workers, and Irish Employees. It seeks to identify key opportunities and problem areas, and the skills, training and support structures required in order to ensure an effective and high quality intercultural work environment that meets the needs of all involved. Transferable Skills in Third-Level Modern Languages Curricula is the title of a project being coordinated by the Careers Service of DCU, involving staff from SALIS, and being conducted in collaboration with Waterford Institute of Technology and Trinity College Dublin. Modern language departments have been chosen to pilot this project as experience has shown that graduates from Arts programmes tend to be less confident about how they fit into the world of work compared with their colleagues from more vocationally-oriented programmes. The overall aim of the project is to increase the awareness and acquisition of transferable skills by undergraduate students. A team was established within SALIS in 2002 which set up the School’s European Language Portfolio Project. The aim of this project is to design a language portfolio tailored to the needs of SALIS students and validated by the Council of Europe as part of the “European Language Portfolio” initiative. The particular research focus with the portfolio in DCU concerns further development of the intercultural aspects of the portfolio and tailoring it to assessment systems within an Irish university context. The Thematic
Network Project on Languages is also a Europe-wide project which
the School is involved in and which has, over the last three years,
produced reports on, inter alia, the evolution of new learning
techologies for languages and recent developments in the language-leraning
environment across Europe. All of this activity is carried on in a friendly atmosphere in SALIS, an environment where there is an easy mixing of people from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds and from a wide range of academic disciplines.
Dublin City University Dublin 9 Ireland School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies Tel: +353 (0) 1 700 5000 Fax: +353 (0) 1 836 0830 Website: EMail:
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Dublin City University Dublin 9 Ireland School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies Tel: +353 (0) 1 700 5000 Fax: +353 (0) 1 836 0830 Website: EMail:
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