Work Integrated Learning and Languages Studies (WILLS)

Facilitators

The WILLS group would like to extend its reach to colleagues in Australia who have experience in placing students in language/culture-rich contexts or who are interested in starting their own language placement programs. Please contact Eric Bouvet or Lara Anderson for more information.

About

Events

Work Integrated Learning in Languages: Beyond linguistic and cultural benefits

The next meeting of the Work Integrated Learning in Languages (WILLS) Cluster will be taking place at the LCNAU colloquium in November 2021.  This meeting, like the rest of the colloquium, will be online. The exact time and date will be announced in coming weeks when the colloquium program has been finalised. 

This meeting will allow for a semi-structured discussion on the benefits of Work Integrated Learning initiatives which have centred around language students. In particular, we will look at two established WILL programs: Languages@Work (University of Melbourne) and Languages in Action (Flinders University) that provide students with the opportunity to identify and extend on workplace skills, which are so highly valued by employers, such as communication, teamwork, information literacy, professionalism, interpersonal skills, as well as intercultural competence, cultural humility and service. The meeting will begin with an overview of these two conceptually different WILL subjects and we will outline the benefits and challenges of teaching industry or placement-based subjects. The second half of the meeting will focus on a discussion of the important place of intercultural competence in the language curriculum and how experiential learning can be high impact for the development of IC.

The aim of this discussion is to provide an update on two WILL initiatives that have been running now for several years. We hope to hear about similar WILL projects and to encourage  discussion about the synergies between language learning, WIL and IC.