Organizers:  the Centre for Language and Migration

For the past fourteen years, the CTM has been appointed by the Flemish government to support primary schools, secondary schools and schools for adult education in developing and implementing an efficient approach to language teaching and learning for L2-learners and ‘L1-learners at risk’.

The CTM-team, comprising about 50 staff members, works in three fields of action: research, development of educational tools, and in-service training.

The main goal of all these efforts is to raise the quality of (language) education, and in this way, to create (more) equal opportunities for all learners in education, and in society.

	Research Programme

Its research programme includes fundamental and applied research into the relation between language, education and migration. Research mainly focuses on language acquisition, language behaviour in multilingual settings, interaction in the language classroom, language policy, (second) language education, and language testing…
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	Educational Tools

As far as the development of educational tools is concerned, the CTM has published a wide variety of task-based materials for language teaching, and task-based tools for language assessment.
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	Training Programmes

Thirdly, the CTM provides pre-service and in-service training programmes for school counsellors, school teams, (language) teachers, technical and vocational trainers in over a thousand schools. Most of these programmes focus on the implementation of task-based language teaching in the classroom.
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	(Inter)national cooperation

The CTM works together with many other Belgian institutions, both on an academic and a policy level. As far as the applied research and the development of educational materials and tools are concerned, the CTM accepts short-term and long-term assignments from the Ministry of Education, the VDAB (Flemish Department for Employment-finding and Vocational Training), the VOCB (Flemish Support Centre for Adult Education), VLOR (Flemish Educational Council), NTU (The Dutch Language Union), NFWO (National Fund for Scientific Research) and other educational authorities.

On European level the Centre participates in the following programmes: Leonardo (Workable Languages, Multined, Janus), Socrates (Comenius-Topic: the possibilities offered by cooperative language learning methods for language and technical training), INTAS (cooperation with the Universities of Tilburg, Hamburg, London, Nijmegen, Wien).

As a result of the Centre’s expertise in the field of language testing the Certificate Dutch as a Foreign Language, is financed by the Dutch Language Union and set up in cooperation with the University of Amsterdam.

	Publications

Key publications of the Centre for Language and Migration