KVVS9006 Modes of Communication: Multilingualism and Lingua Receptiva (3 cr)

This course aims to raise awareness of issues that arise when communicating through receptive multilingualism, as happens both in multilingual organisations and during the Eurocampus, to encourage you to be more observant and linguistically aware in your dealings with others, especially when using receptive multilingualism in daily interaction and in organisations settings, to provide an introduction to the analytical tools and the terminology needed to analyse and compare different communicative modes such as lingua franca and receptive multilingualism, and to prepare you to analyse the experimental study we will be doing during the course. As the world is globalizing, there is more and more multilingualism in various domains of our lives. Transnational companies, multicultural families, tourist industries – all these spheres trigger new modes of communication. English as lingua franca is certainly an important, yet, not the only possible way of communication. Lingua receptiva (LaRa), or receptive multilingualism (RML) is an alternative mode in which interlocutors use their mother tongue for production and rely on receptive skills in L2/L+ for comprehension.