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News, developments and articles from Regina Coeli
The power of virtual reality in language learning
Teaching in English has long since ceased to be unique for lecturers at Dutch colleges and universities. ‘The students all speak good English. Often better than me,’ says Katinka Pani-Harreman. She teaches at Zuyd Hogeschool’s academy of facility management and does research in the field of vital communities. To become more at ease in English, she took a course at Regina Coeli, where she discovered, among other things, the power of virtual reality.
What language do you communicate in?
When you zoom in on language, you find that a multitude of languages are spoken in the Netherlands. Recent research has shown that 25% of adults here prefer to speak a language other than Dutch at home.If you aren’t required to learn Dutch, you can generally get by with English. An important question then is: is your English and that of your conversation partners up to scratch? And you could also ask yourself whether you’re comfortable not being able to understand and speak Dutch.
Take a journey by reading a book
When you were in school, you probably frequently heard that reading books was good for your language development. No matter how much education has changed, schools still really promote reading, so an idea that has survived all these years must have some merit to it, you might say. In fact, reading books helps you develop your language skills even when you learn a foreign language as an adult.
Little time and still learning a language
Learning a language takes time. If your days are already jam-packed with work, sports and family commitments, it can be hard to fit in time to study every week. Then it’s a godsend to be able to concentrate completely on learning a language for a week. That's what Edo Boerefijn, Chief Operating Officer at Cryonorm, did, for example.
Take your English skills up a notch
For global citizens, it is becoming the norm to speak English as fluently as their own languages. Young people grow up with English all around them, and their higher education is taught in English increasingly often, almost to the point that they have a better command of writing in English than in their mother tongue. Yet, let us be honest—you are setting the bar quite high if you want to communicate as easily in a foreign language as in your native one. Here are a few tips to help take your English skills up a notch.
Working in an international team
If you work in an international team, you have probably noticed how varied your colleagues’ English can be. Even when everyone hears the exact same sentence, they might have a different understanding of what has been said. Here are a few tips for communicating in an international team.