For more than three decades, the Canton of Valais “Bureau des Echanges Linguistiques” (office for language exchanges) has been responsible for coordinating language exchange programmes in the canton’s two language regions as well as outside the cantonal borders. In addition, exchange activities in the canton are also organised independently by families, school classes or schools.

When commencing the compulsory education curriculum, pupils are five years old and are assumed to have mastered the oral foundations of the language of instruction. In some districts however, up to 80% of pupils entering 1H speak a different language at home, and between 60 and 70% do not speak or understand French at all. The processes whereby so-called “allophone” students, even if many of them were born in Switzerland, acquire phonological representations of French (i.e.

When asked about their goals, students learning a foreign language generally say they want to speak the language. Despite the value placed on speaking, however, various studies on the foreign language competence of Swiss school students reveal that many learners have difficulty in meeting the learning outcomes set for spoken language (Peyer et al. 2016, Wiedenkeller/Lenz 2019).

The aim of the DiCoi project is on the one hand to produce teaching material from recordings of authentic conversations (spoken language corpora) and on the other hand to describe the longitudinal development of interaction skills (over 2 years) from recordings of free interactions. Spoken language corpora can be used as a resource for foreign language teaching with the aim of providing exposure to the authentically produced but contextualised target language.

Language exchange activities are widely viewed as a means of promoting language and intercultural competence and as a way to motivate students to learn a foreign language. Indeed,  recently, educational policy has strengthened its commitment to advance and intensify language exchange.

The purpose of this project is to study the ‟comprehension‟ aspect of oral interaction competence. More specifically, this involves studying the linguistic and cultural characteristics of comprehension in oral interactions as well as testing teaching sequences that target comprehension in oral interactions for an audience of advanced learners of French as a foreign language.

The aim of this project is to investigate the potential uses of research corpora in teaching. This long-term project is carried out in collaboration with other research groups in Switzerland and France, in particular in Lyon as part of the project CLAPI-FLE http://clapi.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/FLE/projet_clapi_fle.php.

The purpose of this project is to conduct a detailed analysis on language census issues in Switzerland since the 19th century and to better understand the role this tool plays in the Swiss political landscape. This project will also support the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) in developing future census tools. This will ensure that actual sociolinguistic facts are taken into account when designing thematic questionnaires on languages.

Despite the acknowledged benefit of language (and cultural) exchange at all school levels, the promotion of this instrument has had limited impact on exchanges actually conducted. The organisation and preparation of exchange and contact opportunities requires a considerable amount of extra work on the part of teachers; for them to consent to taking on such an effort, strong convictions and high motivation as well as institutional support are required.