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Do internationalisation strategies and student motivation meet?

Foreign language skills and plurilingualism have had a high priority at Finnish universities for a long time, especially at the business schools. Functional skills in foreign languages are necessary both in future working life and for successful research or work periods abroad. 

However the willingness to learn languages at a higher proficiency level seems to be stagnating in both schools and universities at the moment. It is expected that fewer and fewer university graduates in Finland will enter working life with functional language competence in languages other than English.

In order to develop an attractive selection of foreign languages for business students and to design adequate study guidance, it is important to know why students choose certain languages and not others.

The motives and attitudes towards foreign languages and plurilingualism will be determined with the help of an extensive survey covering several languages.The survey is targeted at business students from several Finnish business schools (University of Oulu, Turku School of Economics, Helsinki School of Economics, Lappeenranta Technical University, Jyväskylä and Kuopio University).

This study “Business Students’ Choices of Foreign Languages” compliments an earlier study “Kauppatieteiden maisterien työelämän kielitaitotarpeet – kohtaavatko koulutus ja käytäntö”, and it is the first wider study on this theme. 

Time-table

Joachim Schlabach (Department of Languages, Turku School of Economics) & Sabine Grasz (Language Centre, University of Oulu)