Learnings from LTAG - Dr Hong Cai

The Meeting Multilingual Minds facilitates language and cultural exchanges between ‘Language Learners’ enrolled in language courses and ‘native’ speakers of those languages, who volunteer as ‘Language Helpers’ by registering their interest through the web form. The Learners and Helpers are connected by language teachers who see the benefit of having ‘native’ speakers in their courses for interlingual and intercultural communication.

What was the impact of your project?

Before this initiative, the language programs were physically and administratively separated and there were few opportunities for staff members and students to communicate and collaborate. At the University of Adelaide, Chinese and Japanese belong to the School of Social Sciences, French, German and Spanish are situated in the School of Humanities and English is taught by the English Language Centre. Italian, Modern Greek and Indonesian are offered by Flinders University through cross-institutional study.

This project has provided an integrated platform for academics and students from different languages to promote the Meeting Multilingual Minds language initiative and create interactive learning activities. In addition to demonstrating an authentic approach to teaching languages, the project also supports the social inclusion and cultural integration of international students and enhances both international and domestic student experiences across disciplines.

The Grant also enabled the team to reward sixteen students of these languages who produced thirteen outstanding videos in two categories: Best Video about the Program and Best Video in the Language. All of the videos are available on the webpage.

One thing that surprised me in undertaking this activity was…

Our students are extremely talented in language learning and video making. Please watch their videos on our website! Their videos are hilariously creative and present many fun ways to learn a foreign/additional language.Hong Cai

Maybe this is not typically “surprising” but rather heart-warming; I also found that our colleagues are amazingly supportive. I want to shout out a big thank you to Dan McCafferty, Joanne England and Carmel D'Angelo from Web Operations and ITDS, and Bethany Ottaway and Eleanor Danenberg from Marketing and Communications. We also received generous support from all our disciplines, departments and Schools. Sincere thanks to all!