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Discussion forum (course) – a practical approach to communicative competence development
142-147Views:81The paper describes and discusses the observations and findings of three years of teaching a unique English language course – “Discussion Forum” within the study programme Foreign Languages and Intercultural Communication at the Faculty of Applied Languages, at the University of Economics in Bratislava. It presents the original format as it was introduced in 2010 when the study programme was accredited and its development and alterations based on the collected experience and evidence of both students and teacher. Three debate formats, speech duel, round table and team debate, are described and their shortcomings and merits are evaluated. Finally, the findings and conclusions arrived at since the first implementation, are discussed.
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International interactions in the light of linguistic affinity
Views:160Although international trade economists often highlight the improtance of common currency, FDI flows or other factors in bilateral trade relations, quite few papers focus on the role of languages or linguistic similarities in this respect. The uniqeness and difficulty of this topic lie in its complexity. Analyses generally lean solely on official languages losing useful peaces of information hidden in the fact that a great number of people use other languages in their everyday life. In the absence of common mother tongue bilateral economic interactions can be intensified by foreign languages acquired by a great share of people in both countries. We emphasize that english seems to be the only universal mediator among trading countries in the world. A further aim of this paper using the results of Eurobarometer surveys is to point to the role of linguistic affinity in international economic interactions based on the case of Estonia, Finland and Hungary.
Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) codes: F10; Z10