The language Center of the University of Verona
an Italian experience

by Sandra Campisi  

The University of Verona is a relatively new university: founded in 1982, after having served as a branch of the University of Padua for many years, the number of students has constantly increased, thus forcing the university to widen the range of its courses, while creating new facilities and adapting to the modern needs of this growing institution. Due to its young age, the University of Verona has in many areas been able to introduce innovative and modern methods into a structure which in many traditional universities has become rather too rigid to allow for much experimentation. The university of Verona, counting about 13.500 students in 1994/95, includes six faculties: the Faculty of Economics, the Faculty of Law, the Faculty of Arts, the Faculty of Foreign Languages, the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Natural Sciences. Among the common facilities at disposal of all the students (such as the library, the computer Center and the study the room), the one I deem of the greatest interest is the university language Center, the so-called Centro Linguistico d'Ateneo, in short CLA, which opened its doors to the students offering full use of all its facilities only a couple of years ago.

In the following, I would like to take the reader on a short tour of the above mentioned language Center by setting out to describe the CLA, its facilities, the laboratories, etc. and then considering its main objectives. If your idea of a language Center is based on one of those traditional linguistic laboratories in which each student is caged into a small space, a low wall blocking the sight of his neighbour left and right, headphones on his head and the teacher in the very front putting the tape in the recorder, then you're in for a surprise. That kind of a laboratory is nowadays regarded to be out of date. As many universities, schools and other institutes have discovered in the course of time, the setting up of such a laboratory proved to be extremely costly and soon after its instalment fell completely into disuse. The teaching of a second or foreign language has undergone many changes in the last decades mainly due to new insight gained in the field of language acquisition and language learning. Hence, the modern language Center has had to adapt and adjust itself to the requirements of today's students.

Although the language Center of the university of Verona actually provides such a language laboratory aimed purely at the skills of listening and speaking, this area is only a small part of the language Center as a whole. The above-mentioned laboratory, an old facility set up years ago for the learning of a foreign language, was absorbed into the new language Center: there are twenty-one seats all equipped with headphones and microphones and connected with a satellite reception. The students can make use of the many cassettes available in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian and modern Greek, in order to follow a programme of autonomous learning. Sometimes lessons are even held in this laboratory, a room which is really not ideal for teaching to say the least: fixed tables all set out in one direction do not foster communication or create any space for games, the acting of sketches, or anything involving student participation. Language teachers have discovered that the best classroom is actually the most simple one in which tables can be moved around according to the need and desire of the teacher or student.

The language lab is the least utilized area of the Center for reasons quite apparent and understandable: the possibility of exploiting the multimedia is another factor. In today's world the computer has taken over, so much so that we would be lost without it. Even in the learning and teaching of a foreign language the teacher and student cannot overlook the importance of computer software. Computer Aided Instruction, CAI, and especially Computer Assisted Language Learning, in short CALL, are gaining ever-growing success all over the world of language teaching. The multimedia station of the Center, in which the students have access to over twenty computers equipped with headphones and microphones, offers an amazing range of possibilities to the student who wishes to learn a language either guided by a teacher or autonomously: language lessons, research in dictionaries etc. via CD ROMS, tests to check one's own language ability and level, research via Internet, contacts with speakers of the foreign language via E-mail, and so on.

The skills trained here do not only involve listening and speaking but also reading and writing. As may be imagined, this lab is always busy, not only due to surfers, but also with students making use of the material at the student's disposal in the Center (such as CD ROMS). Next door to this lab there is the self-access video laboratory, also a favourite among language students and often fully booked. It consists of twelve TV sets (again headphones are available) with video recorders and a satellite connection: each user can choose independently among the list of SAT channels available in the various languages, or he can resort to the videos of the Center consisting of language courses, films (some with subtitles), documentaries, etc. Apart from these three didactic laboratories, the CLA also provides an editing laboratory (with video recorders, a film camera and an audio-video mixer directed towards the development of linguistic research and the production of teaching and learning material on software), a technician's laboratory and five classrooms all equipped with a TV set, a video recorder, a satellite receptor, a cassette recorder and a radio.

Of course the CLA area, in addition to the above described laboratories, comprises the offices of the director of the Center, of the secretaries, and of the so-called linguistic experts. Thus, it is obvious that the language Center is much more than a facility for the autonomous study of a foreign language. In its own WWW homepage the University of Verona states the following: "The university language Center co-ordinates the facilities for foreign language teaching. [...] The University of Verona has set up the language Center to promote self-study and improve foreign language learning on the part of students of all faculties, as well as teaching and non-teaching staff." We are dealing here with an autonomous Center that serves the purpose of teaching or promoting the study of the following languages: English, French, German, Spanish and Russian. It organizes these language courses at various levels, depending on the target the student wishes or is required to reach. At the end of the course the CLA gives a certificate to the students who have passed the language test successfully. The students do not have to attend the class in order to take the test - just as long as they manage to pass it and qualify for the certificate. The latter is indispensable for taking the official language examination in the Faculty the student is enrolled in: every Faculty of the University of Verona requires its students to pass a language examination - administered by the Faculty itself - at some time or other in the course of their studies (at different levels according to the Faculty).

Yet, giving out certificates and teaching the language are not the only objectives of the university language Center. It also aims at ensuring a service of language authoring and at producing its own teaching material and software, be it for the teaching, the testing or the self-study of the foreign language. Last but not least, the CLA has set out to emphasize the importance of research, especially research in the didactic field of study. Although, as mentioned above, the Center is very young, it has been very active and its research activities are all the more noteworthy. Not only have several theses connected with language didactics been written in the past academic year, the university language Center has also had a book published on learning to learn in multimedia language Centers1. Furthermore, the CLA organized two conferences in 1997 (on international and national level)2: Certainly, the efficacious teaching of a foreign language is basic to any language Center, but in a university context there are further necessities: innovative research is of the utmost importance in keeping in step with the developments in the very diverse spheres of today's multicultural, highly technical world.

Dott.ssa Sandra Campisi, researcher at the "Co-ordination Center for the development of university structures", European Academy of Bolzano

• C. Gagliardi (a cura di), Imparare ad imparare nei centri linguistici multimediali, Pescara, LUE, 1997, pp.321 (atti del seminario permanente del CLA di Verona dell'A.A. 1996/96).
  
  
• "L'Italiano come lingua nel mondo" and "Authoring: Prodotti Esperienze Proposte".