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Welcome to the Language Centre |
Established in 2001, the Language Centre coordinates and teaches all language and communication courses within the university. These currently involve courses in Malay, English, Arabic, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and Spanish. Courses which the Centre has previously offered include German, Tagalog and Thai.
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 undergo at last two semester of their study at the University.
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:
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Academic Teaching
This programme is designed to provide undergraduate and postgraduate students of the University with a high level of academic communication skills.
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, Korean and Italian. 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 will focuses on issues which relate to language teaching and learning in Brunei Darussalam and throughout the world, such as those which contribute to improve 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.
Faculty Activities
The Centre has hosted a number of cultural events which have been well-received by both university students and the public alike. Previously-held activities during the first semester of the 2006/07 academic year included a screening of a Japanese film entitled ‘Train Man’ in September, as well as a Korean Language and Culture Week which was held at the University last October. The Language and Culture Week served to showcase the various aspects of Korean life and living through exhibits and live demonstrations, and received an encouraging response from students along with members of the public.
Such activities are a constant on the Language Centre’s agenda and are geared towards making known the courses available at the Centre, as well as promoting the function of the Centre as the focal coordinator of foreign-language teaching in the country.
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Through these events, the Centre also aims to display the diverse and perhaps little-known elements of different cultures, on top of offering language students the opportunity to learn their respective language in context by being able to relate them to their original cultural environments.
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