THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE BACKGROUND IN EXCHANGE PROGRAMS

Since 1987, Erasmus program mobility grants have enabled about two million European students to study abroad, enriching their academic and personal experiences. Not only the program has increased the quality of European Higher Education, but also participant students, staff and universities have collaborated to strengthen the European dimension in Higher Education.
Exchange students sometimes travel to the destination university without a previous knowledge of the local language or with just a beginner level. Universities often offer intensive preparation courses before students’ departure, but whenever this course is the first contact with the target language it does not always guarantee proficiency.
We are developing a project to improve the language background prior to the exchange stay for students travelling from our university (Universitat Jaume I, Castelló, Spain) to France. At present, there is not place for French in most of the curricula, but several actions can be still undertaken. We are preparing resources for introducing French in teaching as supplementary materials or for helping students once arrived to their destination.
We have collected information from Erasmus students in France, in order to know their linguistic needs. In this communication, the team of teachers involved in the project and a group of Spanish students in Limoges (France) present a summary of these needs. Some difficulties, which are described here, have been found for communication both in academic activities and in daily life in the first weeks after arrival.
Even if academic success is not necessarily affected, performance could probably be enhanced from the very beginning with a more solid language preparation. We believe that institutional programs considering longer-term language preparation at the home universities would give more options to those students willing to learn or improve French, or other languages, for their exchange purposes.