Introduction

 

Established in 2001, the Language Centre coordinates and teaches all language and communication courses within the university. In addition, the Centre is responsible for preparing evaluative procedures for all the languages it teaches, which will allow for the identification and monitoring of students’ language and communication skills development in their university-required language courses, as well as their core and elective language courses throughout their stay in the University. A large part of these evaluative procedures is focused on the developmental university required EAP (English for Academic Purposes) courses which students have to take for two semesters.

The Centre organizes and streamlines all language and communication courses offered by UBD (particularly those for academic, professional and other specialized purposes) through the management of five different programmes as follows:

Academic Teaching

This programme is designed to provide undergraduate and postgraduate students of the University with a high level of academic communication skills and to prepare them for their third year of study which may be spent in a foreign country, also known as the Discovery Year.

Community Service

The Language Centre undertakes consultancies and provides services (such as offering advice to Ministry of Education committees, as well to other committees and bodies in other ministries, and organizing training workshops and seminars) in various language-related areas.

In-Service Training

The Centre also hosts conferences and runs in-service courses, workshops and seminars on language-related themes, both national and internationally, for staff of the University as well as language practitioners from government and private schools. The International Conference on Learning and Teaching Languages in Multilingual Societies held in September 2001, for example, was highly successful.

Continuing Education

Thanks to the Centre’s teaching expertise in a wide range of target languages, special courses for the general public and for specific clients from outside the University can and have been designed and taught. Such courses are currently offered to officers of the Philippines Embassy, officers of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China and officers of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Brunei Darussalam.

The public language courses that the Language Centre has been conducting under its Continuing Education Programme include Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, French, Malay and Korean. Each language course is offered at three levels: Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced, corresponding with and depending on the students’ proficiency in the language.

The courses typically focus on functional communication and skills instructions with emphasis on building spoken communicative competency. Each levels covers 20 hours of instruction and an assessment, normally over a period of 5 weeks, after which certificates are awarded.

 

Research

The Language Centre also conducts research in the areas of communication, language teaching/learning and other related areas. The Language Centre’s research reflects the present and future needs of the nation and the community, and focuses on issues which relate to language teaching and learning in Brunei Darussalam and throughout the world, such as those which contribute to the improving of teaching and learning. The findings from such research are made available to both the language-teaching community and the wider public through local as well as international conferences, seminars, workshop, presentations, public lectures and various publications by the academic staff of the Centre.

The Centre’s on-going project is the development of a Resource Unit with access to the latest information technology equipment, in addition to teaching-support publications in all the languages that are taught at the Centre. In this regard, the Centre’s latest ICT acquisition is a state-of-the-art multimedia laboratory that is presently used to support language teaching as well as an e-learning pilot project in collaboration with the Ministry of Education.