Teaching Romanian as a Foreign Language. Formal and Non-formal Education Perspectives

Abstract

Romanian is a less-widely spoken language. Despite this fact, most of the Romanian universities and about 50 foreign universities all around the world have Romanian Sections, where both the language and elements of culture and civilization, literature, history, arts etc. are taught. This chapter focuses on teaching Romanian as a foreign language within the national borders and in foreign universities, as compared to other languages. We deal with challenges teachers have: a certain lack of modern course books, a rather old perspective on teaching methodology, heterogeneity of students (as they come form diverse countries, having very different native languages), etc. We explore how recent theoretical research and practice in the field of teaching methodology can be adapted to Romanian. In the last part, we explain how MOOCs and TEL can help students to improve their language and cultural competencies and we make some suggestions of improvement which could be applied to other less-studied foreign languages.