In today’s globalized world, engineering education must prepare students to navigate multilingualand multicultural contexts effectively. While traditional engineering curricula emphasize technicalexpertise, there is growing recognition of the need to integrate essential skills like multilingualisminto higher education. Multilingual competence enhances students’ ability to communicate,collaborate, and solve problems in diverse professional settings, making it an invaluable asset forfuture engineers. To address this need, we have designed a plurilingual course for engineeringstudents at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. The course builds onstudents’ existing language skills and develops additional linguistic competencies relevant toprofessional contexts. With a focus on real-world applications, it employs a plurilingual approachfocusing on intercomprehension, code-switching, cross-cultural communication and mediation. Wewant to explore the role of plurilingualism in engineering education by addressing the followingresearch questions: (1) How does a plurilingual approach enhance engineering students'communication and problem-solving skills? (2) How do students perceive the value of multilingualcompetencies in their academic and professional development? (3) How can plurilingual educationbe effectively incorporated into technical university curricula? To investigate those questions, we willpresent an initial evaluation of the course (first run during spring 2025), based on qualitative datacollected through student interviews and feedback, providing insights into the course’s impact onboth students and instructors. In addition, we will examine how students recognize and valueplurilingualism in their education and future careers. We will also discuss how such a course fits intothe language unit of a technical university and how it can be used for future course development. Byembedding plurilingual education into engineering studies, we aim to set a new standard forintegrating essential skills into STEM education.

Blended learning (BL) är en etablerad och central del i dagens högre utbildning. Onlinekommunikation änvänds i både studier och arbete, och att lära sig att kommunicera effektivt online bör vara ett mål för språkinlärning (DeMolder et al. 2023). Flera studier visar att 46blended language learning (BLL) leder till ökad interaktion i alla tre led: lärare-student, student-student samt student-kursinnehåll, så-kallad equivalency of interaction (Anderson 2003). För att kunna formulera en mer omfattande model av BL, som kan vara vägledande i kursdesignen, behövs det dock ytterligare forskning. (DeMolder et al. 2023). Denna presentation undersöker och diskuterar BL i språkundervisning för ingenjörstudenter. Vi grundar oss på praktiknära forskning med utgångspunkt i våra egna kurser. Genom en enkätoch intervjustudie undersöker vi studenternas upplevelse av en BL- samt flipped classroomkursdesign i kurser i franska och tyska för ingenjörer. Syftet med studien är att undersöka huren blandad lärmiljö bäst kan gestaltas för språkundervisningen. Vi presenterar hur BL kan gynna olika språkliga färdigheter samt diskuterar konsekvenser för student- respektive lärarrollen. Fokus ligger på aspekterna tid (synkront/asynkront), studentcentrerad lärande samt interaktion. När det gäller tid, frigör BL många möjligheter: asynkront arbetstid kan användas av den enskilde studenten, men även för möten mellan studenter utan läraren. Här öppnas också möjligheter för enskilda eller små-grupp ”check-ins” mellan lärare och studenter. Man kan således skapa en mer flexibel kursstruktur som automatiskt skapar ett studentcentrerat lärande. Vidare är vi intresserade av den språkliga interaktionen: vilka möjligheter för interaktion skapar vi mellan lärare och student och mellan studenter och hurpåverkar dessa studenternas inlärning? Generation-Z studenterna på KTH är digital natives, vana att arbeta i team, självgående och trivs i mångsidiga och interaktiva inlärningsmiljöer. Tillgången till pedagogiskt och autentiskt material online, i kombination med möjligheterna för onlinespråkutbyten, sätter krav på att skapa en attraktiv och meningsfull språkundervisning för våra studenter. Vi har funnit att en BL-kursdesign i kombination med studentägd lärande, flexibilitet och möjligheten att aktivt tillämpa sina språkkunskapereffektivt tillgodoser våra studenters behov. Vår BL undervisning svarar också både mot digitaliseringen inom högre utbildning och mot de krav som studenterna kommer att möta i sitt yrkesliv: BL speglar dagens arbetsplatser, där synkront och asynkront arbete, samt den konstanta skiftningen mellan face-to-face och online är verklighet. Med studentägd undervisning möljiggör man en förändring av den traditionella lärarrollen, där läraren blir facilitators och mentorer snarare än de enda som sprider kunskap. Studenter uppmuntras att hämta kunskap från ett brett spektrum av källor, så kallade communities of practices (North 2020). Det främjar i sin tur kollaborativt lärande som innebär en skiftning från teacher presence till teaching presence (Vaughan et al. 2013). Vårt bidrag, som sätter BL och språk för online-kommunikation i centrum, utgör ett värdefullt bidrag till ASLA 2024 undertemat Språk och kommunikation i en digitaliserad värld: online-kommunikation och onlinesamarbete är färdigheter som behöver utvecklas och tränas. I en bred trend till online-lärande inom högre utbildning är det vidare nödvändigt att utveckla bärande och meningsfulla BLL koncept.

Multilingualism is an asset in an increasingly interconnected and linguistically diverse world. It promotes linguisticflexibility, cultural sensitivity and cognitive flexibility, as well as the ability to think from various perspectives. Alongsidethe dominance of English, multilingualism is prevalent in many workplaces within the globally operating tech sector. Amultilingual environment requires strategies and skills such as code-switching, transfer, and mediation.The Royal Institute of technology (KTH) at Stockholm, Sweden, offers an international learning environment with a largenumber of international students and academic staff. Furthermore, many students already are multilingual but may notbe prepared to use their multilingual competences in an academic or professional context. Enhancing andstrengthening student’s multilingual competences is an asset, also in the “Anglosphere”. Multilingualism opens doors toa broader professional network by bridging language and cultural barriers. It also enhances problem solving as diverselinguistic and cultural knowledge helps to develop innovative solutions and adapt to different contexts.The department of language and communication at KTH is constantly seeking new teaching and learning methods thatmeet the evolving needs of students and society. This development can entail shifting from more traditional “languagecourses” and offering other ways of learning and practicing languages through skill-based courses, project-basedcourses or workshops and challenge driven education. It implies also new formats of teaching and learning, as blendedlearning and teaching, flipped classroom and collaborative learning (COIL).In this presentation, we will describe our ongoing work with diversifying and renewing language teaching at KTH byintroducing a multilingual course. Our aim is to enhance students’ multilingual competences, preparing them to work inmultilingual, multidisciplinary and multicultural working environments.

According to Dervin (2010), intercultural communication entails savoir-faire, savoir-analyser but also savoir-(ré)agir, in other words identifying actions in co-constructed discourses, being able to analyse discourses in terms of stereotypes, and being able to adapt one’s emotions and actions in intercultural settings. Acting and learning by doing thus play an important role in developing intercultural competencies. We strongly believe that students need to be challenged to act in multicultural settings and that is why we set up a transnational course jointly taught by three teachers from three European universities. The goal of the course was to work in small international and multidisciplinary groups and to identify a sustainability challenge (within the framework of the UN sustainable development goals), define and investigate the challenge, as well as create and present a feasible solution, following the design sprint methodology.

In this presentation, we will focus on the way intercultural communication is explained to students, through selfassessment questionnaires and tasks and how it is enacted by students in small group discussions, debates and decision-making processes. We wanted to offer minimal guidance and to focus on the savoir-(ré)agir that the students would experience in their group work.

To assess our approach, we rely on students’ and teachers’ reflective evaluations of the course and we will base our analysis on teachers’ logs, student interviews at the end of the course, students’ learning journals and two surveys filled in by students at the beginning of the course and the end. This will allow us to map an eventual change in students’ perspectives. With this protocol we wish to explore how much students need to be guided to develop their intercultural communication competence.

The field of language learning has gone through considerable changes with the emergence of new technologies, the endless resources available on the Internet and machine translation tools. The digitalization process with a constantly and instantly range of possibilities for online-language learners has led us to reconsider the format of our language courses. This has subsequently had an impact on the course design, the teacher’s role as well as the student’s role.   Language courses at KTH aim to prepare students for their future professional lives and have a strong focus on language for specific purposes (LSP). These courses have few teaching hours and are very intensive. Furthermore, they are elective courses for most of the students, which requires engaging and flexible learning and teaching formats. Our experience has shown that a blended learning course design as well as student-owned learning are especially well suited for these language courses.  We want to present our multi-dimensional format which combines three dimensions of teaching: online/face-to-face, synchronous/asynchronous and teacher-led/student-owned. A course-design that draws advantage from the potential offered by the combination of these dimensions, provides several pedagogical added-values. 

We want  to present an example of how  to integrate language  for specific purposes (LSP) in language courses for engineers through collaborative online international activities (COIL). These activities are implemented in a flipped classroom (FC) and blended learning format (BL) which gives flexibility and enables online projects. COIL activities are particularly well suited for LSP as it offers a student-owned, authentic and engaging way to practice language skills. COIL activities can be defined as project-based learning where the context defines the learning tasks. In that way, students develop deep content knowledge: collaboration, communication skills including e-communication, intercultural competence, which prepare them for professional situations. We  will  share  examples  based  on  COIL  activities  developed  in  courses  of  French  and  German  for engineering  students,  from  A2  to  B2  levels.  By  sharing  these  practices,  we  hope  to  inspire  other teachers and develop more COIL projects.