Transcript Diapositive 1

Language degrees
and careers
Developing the specific assets of
our students
Elaine Rees, Université Rennes 2
Outline
 How things have changed for language
graduates
 Situation at Université Rennes 2
 Experience of the Multicom project
 Example of a new course in Multilingual
Communication
Changes and specific
assets
 Increasing ‘competition’ from other courses
 Language backgrounds are changing
 Mobility programme students
 Students whose native language is not French (this
year: major European languages + Albanian,
Estonian, Icelandic…)
 Challenge: How to identify and develop specific
skills of language students
 Specific asset: multilingual communication
Situation at Rennes 2
 Langues Etrangères Appliquées
 A: French
 B: English
 C: German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish,
Chinese
 (+ other language ?)
 2 degree options:
 Languages and Business
 Languages, Translation and Multilingual
Communication
Multicom survey
www.multicom-cdp.eu
Typology of professional fields which our
students enter:
 Sales and marketing management
 Public relations and events management
 International corporate or organisational
management
 Translation, technical writing, content
management
Multilingual Communication
Course in L3
 Bringing together specific assets and
career skills needed
Multilingual communication course
Set up in 2012-2013
Final year of the degree programme
How the course works
 Students are given a professional remit
 They research sources in all their
working languages
 They produce a document/or give the
required oral response in one of the
languages
Example
 You are on a placement at the London Chamber of
Commerce. You have been asked to research
innovative ideas for improving the well-being of office
workers in their professional environment.
 Study the documents provided in English and French,
then search for other examples in your working
languages
 Write a short report describing briefly what you have
found and recommend one idea which you think s
particularly pertinent
So far…
 Positive student reaction:
 « savoir utiliser 3 langues en même temps »
 « Searching for solutions to a problem in other languages and seeing
how this problem is dealt with in other countries »
 « We learnt how to switch from one language to another »
 Important that students recognise their own
skills
Questions raised
 Organisation of ‘multilingual’ courses in
compliance with institutional
requirements
 How to give students more confidence in
highlighting their specific assets when
entering the job market
Contact
 [email protected]