Zurich, 4-6 February 2010
Describing, modelling and optimising language
competences has long been a key domain of research in applied
linguistics. Over the last few years, the notion of language competence
has been re-examined and redefined under the influence of research in
sociolinguistics, language education, and, more largely, research on
language use in various settings. The focus has been on teaching and
learning (competence-oriented objectives, task-based teaching and
learning), assessment and programme evaluation as well as the
professionalisation of the language teach-ing field. In the field of
education, in particular, communicative and linguistic com-petences are
presented today as sets of key competences pupils or students need to
acquire. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the introduction of
language stan-dards has been on the political agenda, starting at the
lower grades of school.
Drawing on this interest in the notion
of language competences in education and in the workplace, the
conference aims to stimulate reflection and debate on the multi-ple
transitions and transformations at play: transitions from orality to
literacy (for example, the increasing role of writing in the
workplace), transitions from one reg-ister to another (from standard to
non-standard, etc.), from monolingual practices to multilingualism,
from theory to practice, from face-to-face exchanges to virtual
interactions, from the conceptualisation of the notion of competence to
how it pans out in actual situations, etc.
In concrete terms,
discussion is invited about linguistically manifest transitions and
transformations of competences as they occur across contexts, across
age and so-cial groups, and across school level and developmental
stages: e.g. from primary to secondary school, from high school to
university or from apprenticeships to the professional world. It is
indeed during these transitions that the competences de-veloped become
crucial to building identities or accessing new resources.