This experience takes inspiration from an investigation project that Elena conducted on the occasion of the education she took at Copenhagen's University in teaching Danish as a second language. The experience is specifically inspired by experiential forms of second language learning and teaching such as "Language learning in the wild".
‘Language learning in the wild network’ is presently established in four Nordic countries, including Denmark. As one can read under the project's mission on the official page "it is about using the resources available in the second language life world of the newcomers to a language. When newcomers have arrived in a new society, the new language plays an immediate role in their everyday lives. As a minimum, newcomers are overhearers of and eavesdroppers to spoken and written encounters in public life, education, or at workplaces and in the media. In this way, the second language has a paramount presence in the learners’ daily lives even before they have acquired the nuts and bolts for using it actively".
Being inspired by this approach, this package of tour-lessons aims at giving the language learners an alternative context where to be linguistically stimulated. The language will be therefore used outside from the traditional learning space, which is the classroom. It will be, instead, used in the open space of Copenhagen and/or through cultural institutions, art exhibitions and events. This offer of tour-lessons aims at combining the language learning with the urban exploration so to hopefully learn the language through a more active behaviour in a more authentic space (the second language user will be taken out into the ‘wild’ where the target language is spoken) as well as get to understand the pragmatic of the language.
Since experiential language learning does not give up the classroom as a learning space, it is definitely a smart idea to combine this experience with traditional language learning in class. The experience in the ‘wild’ should hopefully nourish the experiences in the classroom, once taken it back to there.
Other than consolidate knowledge in language and culture, this tour-course is filled with social importance since it will contribute connecting the language user to the surrounding communities.
Being Elena a teacher in Danish as a second language and having she a bachelor in Modern and Contemporary Languages and Civilisations, she offers this tour-course to seconde language users of Danish, Italian and Spanish, all depending on the language you wish to learn.
Contact us for further information.
