Liaison Magazine - LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and ...

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news
LLAS offers a range of
freely available resources
designed to support and
promote language learning
in UK higher education.We are
particularly proud of our latest
resource: the Discover American
Studies CD-ROM, which was launched
at the British Association for American Studies conference
in Edinburgh on 29th March. Funded by the United States
Embassy in London, the content was authored by Sara
Wood and Dick Ellis from the Department of American
and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham, and
designed and published by LLAS. Featuring presentations,
essays, video clips and interactive features, the CD-ROM
demonstrates the benefits of studying for a degree in
American Studies and is designed to be used for
promotional purposes in schools, further
education colleges and at university open days.
A new poster is now available from the Subject
Centre's “700 reasons” suite of materials.This poster
is accompanied by a set of post-it notes which can be
used by learners to write down their own reasons for
studying languages and which can be stuck onto or
alongside the poster. More reasons can be found in LLAS’s
700 reasons database, www.llas.ac.uk/700reasons, which is
based on Angela Gallagher-Brett’s 2005 research report.
More resources and information, together with the LLAS
Materials Bank, can be found here: www.llas.ac.uk/resources
publications
The past year has seen a number of
new publications from LLAS. In
September 2007, we
published Here be
Dragons
Enterprising
Graduates in the
Humanities,by
Karina Croucher,
John Canning and
Jane Gawthrope.
This report presents
the findings of a
small-scale study of
enterprising humanities
graduates, determining
the circumstances and
motivations that led to their embarking on
particular careers. Graduates from humanities disciplines are
often perceived as having more ambiguous (or at least lessdefined)
career paths compared with those graduating from
vocational subjects, such as law or medicine. Having a more
open avenue offers a range of career opportunities, including
branching out and setting up a business, or becoming selfemployed,
either through choice, necessity or fortune.
November 2007 saw the publication of three
interdisciplinary reports: Disciplines in Dialogue: Disciplinary
Perspectives on Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning, a series of
discipline-specific essays edited by John Canning;
Interdisciplinarity:A Literature Review, by Angelique
Chettiparamb; and The Impact of the Internal Economy of
Higher Education Institutions on Interdisciplinary Teaching and
Learning, by Neill Thew. All publications may be downloaded
from the LLAS website.
Finally, our most recent publication is John Canning’s Five
Years On: the Language Landscape in 2007, which examines the
take-up of languages in schools and higher education since the
publication of A New Landscape for Languages (Kelly and Jones
2003). A New Landscape was the result of research into the
health of modern languages in schools and universities and
offered possibilities for how the language landscape might look
in 2007. Using the most recent statistics, FiveYears On revisits
the report and compares the actual landscape with that
thought possible five years ago.
Browse through all LLAS publications and order copies (where
available) here: www.llas.ac.uk/publications
Liaison magazine • llas.ac.uk •7