New Methods for Teaching Nordic Languages

The Nordplus project "New Methods for Teaching Nordic Languages" charts current teaching content, learning outcomes and pedagogies of the language syllabi at our respective institutions in Estonia, Norway, Lithuania and Iceland. The purpose of the network is to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and experience in order to develop new teaching pedagogies and materials for teaching Scandinavian languages.

What do students of Scandinavian languages need to learn in the course of their Bachelor's degree today? Which courses are relevant? What is the best way to teach the languages, especially in the cases where the students need to learn to understand several Scandinavian languages? And where does the focus of the degree need to be when we don't have enough students to create separate classes for those interested in linguistics, literature, and culture? These are questions we have been asking each other for several years and that our project will explore.

The intended outcome of the project is, first and foremost, to improve our respective curricula. We aim to disseminate our findings through publications and workshops. Another goal is to produce an app or a series of videos that can be used by other teachers of Scandinavian Studies by, for instance, comparing the vowel sounds of the different Scandinavian languages.

1st meeting 24–27 October 2025

The network met for the first time, and all presented the syllabi of their respective institutions. We compared teaching materials and learning goals. We discussed the different challenges that we each face in teaching Scandinavian languages to students who already know a Scandinavian language as well as to those who are learning one for the first time. We also discussed how to best share our findings with other teachers in the Nordic countries, and agreed to aim for both an online learning tool as well as a possible anthology.