Masaryk University is the second-largest public university in the Czech Republic and one of its leading higher education institutions. At present, it consists of 10 faculties and over 200 departments, institutes and clinics and is one of the fastest growing higher education institutions in the country. MU is the most selective university in the Czech Republic and in 2016 enrolled over 33 000 students. The University is involved in a wide range of mobility activities and research programs taking place in the EU and other countries. Scientific research is one of the top priorities of Masaryk University. In the last decades, MU has attained a leading position in competitions for research grants, and is developing tools for the transfer of knowledge while improving overall support for research and innovation. The University is also making considerable financial investments in its new university campus to enhance its excellence in research and teaching capacity. MU was one of the first universities to implement ECTS and since the adoption of its “Strategy for Internationalization” in 2003 has been deeply committed to efforts at internationalization as well as to supporting its International Office and working with partners abroad to strengthen links. MU has gained considerable experience in a number of international projects. Since 2007, MU has been involved in the Erasmus Mundus Action II program as one of the first EU institutions. Masaryk University’s involvement in EM2 projects got MU the opportunity to establish further cooperation with many countries around the world; this includes the Middle East, Central Asia, Latin America, South Africa, Russia, Western Balkan and Eastern Asia regions. MU’s involvement in EM2 projects changed to the role of the coordinator for EMAIL and KITE project with ACP region. Under the Erasmus+ programme, MU is currently the coordinator of two projects - TACTIC project with the Mongolian and SEA partners and STAR with Georgia and China and very active partner in a number of CBHE projects.

Within SEAH the skills and expertise of MU partners will be instrumental for:

- mapping the field (within Intellectual Output 1), in order to identify the language learning needs of Erasmus students in Architecture and Construction (AC);

- developing corpus design and corpora for the German Language in the field of AC (within Intellectual Output 1);

- developing innovative language learning materials for German (Intellectual Output 3).

Team:

Jan Ettler

Assistant researcher at the Masaryk University, long-time developer of the German-Czech parallel corpus. His interests cover corpus linguistics, foreign languages teaching based on corpus data and engineering. His role within the SEAH project includes data collection, research and analysis. (ettler@mail.muni.cz)

Helena Hradílková

German language lecturer at the Masaryk University, Department of German Language and Literature – Faculty of Education. Her interests cover language didactics, computer assisted language learning and media in teaching German. Her role within this project is developing the didactic part of the German version of SEAH. (hradilkova@ped.muni.cz)

Tomas Kana:

Associate Professor at the Department of German Language and Literature at MU also holds courses at the German Institute of Vienna University. His teaching areas cover: (corpus based) lexicology, stylistics, linguistics of discourse and translations. He is convinced that corpora are essential for a democratic approach to teaching languages. Within the SEAH project he is the coordinator for the German part. (kana@ped.muni.cz)

Radek Pospisil:

Assistant for international relations is also a senior lecturer at the Department of Education at the Masaryk University. He feeds the team with pedagogical expertise and experience in teaching adults professional language. He is also the administrative and quality assurance leader of the team for German. (pospisil@ped.muni.cz)