The current situation and prospects for German as a foreign and technical language at universities of applied sciences in Serbia

Abstract

The five main language policy issues at EU level were conceived in the Barcelona target as conclusions of the Council of Europe on foreign language teaching: (1) foreign language canon; (2) quality of foreign language teaching with a focus on the teachers and their stay abroad; (3) bilingual education as a teaching concept; (4) the expected level of achievement in the foreign language; (5) language support for migrant learners (European Commission, 2017a; European Commission, 2017b; European Commission, 2017c: 5-8). The objective of Barcelona is to support foreign language teaching, and thus it could represent a basis for the legal regulations in the field of language policy in the broader sense of foreign language teaching and also specifically of technical language teaching.The European Commission supports multilingualism at various levels, such as at the legal level, language policy guidelines and with concrete proposals for the adequate training and further education of teachers and also for the entire teaching process. The desired multilingualism is mostly realized through English lessons, which is the result of the fact that the EU initiatives and recommendations are often not directly and fully applied at the national level.In this lecture, the current situation of the teaching practice of technical language teaching in the German language at universities of applied sciences in Serbia will be presented. Finally, recommendations are made for the implementation of technical language classes in Serbia. The aim of the work is to present the current problems and challenges of teaching the technical language German in Serbia.