Language Learning: Practical Issues and Theoretical problems

Language learning in an academic context has specific demands – it needs to appeal to experienced and qualified learners and it must take into account the special needs of academia, which may be very different from language learning for practical reasons only. Commercial language teaching is mostly directed on communicative skills but fails to introduce the learners to the language in a systematic and scholarly way that will enable they to not only apply the language successfully, but also to proceed into linguistic studies of all sorts.
For widely taught languages, specific language teaching materials for academic needs are available. As for ‘’rare’’ languages, among which count the Central Asian languages Uzbek and Kazakh, such materials do as yet not exist. A major goal of the cooperation of partners from the Samarkand Institute of World Languages and Nazarbayev University Astana with the staff of the Central Asian Seminar of Humboldt Universitaet is the production of a high quality set of academic learning materials for the Uzbek and Kazakh languages. It goes without saying that such projects can be successfully carried out only through the active cooperation of mother tongue speakers of both the target language and the language of academic instruction.
The practical goal of the one – year cooperation project we want to propose to Erasmus Plus is a solid outline for a set of teaching/ learning materials for both languages, Uzbek and Kazakh, comparable to B2 level.