Promoting the integration of migrants in Switzerland is a legislative objective of the Swiss Federal Council, and the ability to speak one of the country’s languages is regarded as a critical step towards realising this goal. This overarching aim and the federal model “Framework proposal to promote language skills” (Rahmenkonzept Sprachförderung) provided the basis for the Institute of Multilingualism’s “Framework curriculum for promoting language skills of migrants”, commissioned by...

The SEM had issued a mandate to the Institute of Multilingualism to develop a quality strategy for fide language courses. The purpose of the strategy is to create a common understanding of fide’s didactic principles and to support the implementation of fide in practices used to support language learning. The evaluation of the introductory fide courses and various comments from educational institutions had shown that fide was still interpreted in a variety of ways.

This project is based on the results of a survey of teachers at upper secondary schools, which was carried out by the General Secretariat of the Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education (EDK). The results revealed a need to couple new methodological approaches in foreign language teaching – and the corresponding instruments – with teaching literature. This issue is of particular relevance in upper secondary schools, where language learning is embedded in a literary-cultural...

The six Swiss cantons located along the German-French language border (Bern, Basel Landschaft, Basel Stadt, Fribourg, Solothurn and Valais) have issued an inter-cantonal agreement on a new concept for foreign language education at schools. The agreement stipulates that German-speaking students learn French before English.

The aim of this project is to study the linguistic competences of bilingual children when producing written texts in Spanish. The participant children attend heritage language and culture (HLC) courses. The main research question is: How do bilingual children of Spanish-speaking origin learn and conserve writing competences in Spanish in a context of formal instruction (HLC courses)?

Chunsch druus? (Swiss German for “get it?”) is a learning programme aimed at the general, mainly younger learner who wishes to develop key linguistic competences necessary for coping with the challenges of everyday life in the German part of Switzerland. Integration in the largest sector of Switzerland mustn’t overlook the use of dialect. This does not mean that foreigners, migrants or Swiss who speak Italian and French necessarily need to learn how to speak a Swiss German dialect –...

This project aims at documenting and discussing the conditions for implementing bilingual teaching at primary school level based on two main issues:

This project aimed to gain empirical knowledge about how learners deal with multilingual teaching approaches in the foreign language classroom and to acquire a better understanding of the potential and the functioning of different types of multilingual teaching activities.

If the aim is to measure how well learners can actually use a foreign language, then competence-oriented testing with near-authentic tasks is the method of choice. There is, however, a need for renewal in the design of such test tasks, especially because real-world language use often uses electronic channels. Chat, Internet searches and the like are part of everyday life. In addition, computer-based testing has increasingly become the norm in recent years, especially in the field of...

At the start of the school year 2018/2019, the Canton of Solothurn will begin the comprehensive introduction of Clin d’œil and New World, the new foreign language textbooks developed in the scope of the “Passepartout” project. Both textbooks have already been used in lower-secondary schools B (basic curriculum) and E (expanded curriculum) since the start of the school year 2015/2016.