Education

This course is designed to equip prospective EFL teachers to teach writing successfully in their future classrooms. It reviews research on foreign language and EFL writing pedagogy and suggests new teaching methods based on the latest developments in this field.

Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is a unique feature of the education provided at Maastricht. This educational system focuses on guiding students to become independent and enterprising problem-solvers. To achieve this goal, teaching must extend beyond the traditional individual studying and attending lectures. Students work in small groups on concrete problems from the field. As a team, they analyze problems, attempt to understand the underlying theories, and learn to apply knowledge to recognizable, realistic situations. To perform well in this educational system, it is vital for students to have knowledge of the background and central elements of this system. During this course, students learn and practice the skills needed to be successful in tutorial group meetings. First-year students familiarize themselves with Problem-Based Learning and communication skills essential for learning in groups. One session will be completely devoted to teambuilding.

Corresponding practicals for Skills I are: Introduction UM Systems and Library Introduction.

The course is part of the Laurea Triennale degree program.. The course explores some of the main concepts and topics of intercultural education including multiculturalism and interculturality, migratory flows and models of integration and coexistence, stereotypes and prejudices, racism, second generations of immigrants, migrant literature, multicultural classes, ethnic-cultural conflict and its management, and sectarianism and religious pluralism.

This course provides an introduction to youth studies, with a particular focus on the association between youth and the globalizing world. The course considers a broad body of interdisciplinary scholarships such as history, education, politics, and the environment. Students discuss the increasing use of social media by youth movements in creating changes in society and the notion of young people as the agents of change. This course brings in perspectives from various parts of the world through diverse reading materials. The reading materials provide a fundamental understanding of youth studies (Cieslik and Simpson, 2013), global situation of young people (UN, 2003), and engage critically in the discussion of youth as an agent of change (Sukarieh and Tannock, 2015; Kwon, 2013).

This course is an upper-division introduction to linguistics, the scientific study of human language, and to what characterizes human language and makes it different from other animal communication systems and other human cognitive systems. The course introduces the different components that human language is made of and how linguists investigate them. In particular, it looks at sounds (and signs) and how they can be combined to form bigger units up to words (phonetics, phonology, and morphology); it looks at words and how they can be combined to form bigger units up to sentences (syntax); finally, it looks at how words and sentences can be used to convey meaning (semantics and pragmatics). While doing so, it emphasizes the innate cognitive aspects of human language but also touches on those aspects that are sensitive to culture and society and determine some of the variation and differences among human languages. Some of the question the course addresses include: what is a language and what does knowledge of a language consist of; are human languages fundamentally different from other systems of animal communication; are some languages better than others; what's a dialect and how does it compare to a language; how do children acquire language, does our knowledge of language derive entirely from experience, or do humans come “hardwired” with certain innate capacities for language; how do languages develop and change over time? For practical reasons, English is the primary source of data and examples for the course for practical reasons as the lingua franca. Still, data from other languages are presented throughout the course, with special attention to Italian, other languages (aka "dialects") spoken in Italy, and languages spoken by the students in the course.