In collaboration with the University of Teacher Education St. Gallen (PHSG) and the Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera Italiana (SUPSI)  

In the spring of 2017, the CDIP/EDK assessed for the first time the basic skills in the first foreign language of schoolchildren at the end of primary school. On the basis of this assessment, the “Passepartout cantons” (the six cantons on the French-German language border) investigated how well the targets were achieved in French. The Research Centre on Multilingualism had the responsibility of developing test tasks for this purpose, and the project Task Lab was conducted in the scope...

Concluded at the end of 2013, the project "Italiano ricettivo" developed the teaching material Capito?, which is intended for use either in classroom settings or as self-study tools. The aim of  Capito? is the development of receptive skills in Italian, allowing learners to gain access to the language and culture of the Ticino (and Graubünden). Concentrating on receptive multilingual skills advances a form of communication based on mutual ability to understand one another and...

Project conducted by the University of Geneva (UNIGE)

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.

This pan-European project was initiated in 2010 by the British Council and aimed at developing an index in order to compare the language environment in 20 European countries. The index captures the following aspects: (foreign) language teaching, languages in the workplace, in the media and in public spaces as well as language policy. Several language types were analysed: official state language(s), foreign languages, regional minority languages and immigrant minority languages....

In this project, commissioned by NWEDK, EDK Ost and BKZ, suitable lingualevel test packages were compiled to test the levels of the foreign languages French and English in public schools in the German-speaking cantons, years 6 through 9. These assessments allow planners to accurately gauge the current abilities students have in the foreign languages and to provide useful information for more efficient planning in the future.

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 lays out a critical approach towards a pedagogy of diversity that takes social inequality among children as a starting point and reflects on how social processes at school transform social inequality into educational inequality. The project investigates the ideological foundations in intercultural pedagogical theories as well as their inherent socio-cultural and egalitarian excesses.

The potential to learn foreign languages varies from one individual to the next and has been investigated by many researchers as of the early 1950s. Individuals’ ability to learn foreign languages relies on various elements that have been identified and grouped under the term language aptitude (ability to retrieve, identify and memorise sound sequences belonging to foreign languages, ability to identify meaningful common features etc.). Another area of the research focuses on emotional/personality...