Synergy

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Authors: Laura Mureşan

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Authors: Dana Sorana URS

The educational focus in most technical universities of the world is still on developing the hard/ technical skills. However, their educational programs have started to include the training of the soft skills that appears to be essential for the multi- sided development of the future specialists. Soft skills have also become a priority within the well- known “courses in communication” that are being taught in the Romanian technical universities. The components that have received special attention and hence, comprehensive elaboration, are mainly those skills aimed at the technical/ business/ oral and written communication including presentations, meetings, reports, short documents etc. Some other components have been constantly neglected, viz. those dealing with the student’s personal development as an individual, his/her self-awareness, intuition, creativity etc. Unfortunately, these abilities are more difficult to teach because they pertain to the deep psychological aspects that, by definition, are neither directly tangible nor teachable through the conventional teaching instruments. The paper suggests some possible tasks, consisting in slides and short movies that might trigger in students emotions/ ideas conducive to the awakening of some latent aspects of self-knowledge.

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Authors: Gene TANTA

This paper continues the conversation begun at the QUEST international conference on the topic of how to apply Socratic and Diogenic ideas to engage students in their own liberal education. How might we invite students to dialogue about the need to do the imaginative work of offering a vision rather than just settling for judgments? As a result of teaching and researching over the past year in Romania as a Senior Fulbright Scholar, my answer to this complex question is fairly simple: I try to perform vulnerability.

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Authors: Zinaida-Tamara FEDOT

The Russian language is going through a transitional linguistic period characterized by a massive assault of influences from foreign languages, primarily from the English language. The lexical corpus is now enriched and continues to enrich itself with a variety of words designating objects, phenomena, processes and new concepts that have no equivalent terms in Russian. The process of external term borrowing is reflected in the process of a language`s development and the vocabulary reflects this reality, reacting quickly to social, political and cultural changes that occur in that respective society. We have tried to illustrate how borrowed economic terms are adapting in Romanian and Russian.

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Authors: Pilar GONZALEZ-VERA

This paper aims to show the analysis of the survey prepared for first-year students in the grades of primary education. It presents the questionnaire designed to ascertain the expectations and needs in the English class of undergraduate students who will be primary school teachers in the near future. The study shows a wants and needs analysis of the respondents based on their answers and indicates the main needs of the Spanish English learners.

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Authors: Traute TAESCHNER; Anca COLIBABA; Irina GHEORGHIU

This article presents the theoretical basis of an innovative methodology, the ‘Narrative Format’ used in teaching foreign languages to young children, as well as its implementation in Romania by EuroEd Foundation, Iasi. The intergenerational learning model applied both in families and kindergartens has been developed by the ‘Bilfam’ project co-financed by the European Union under the Lifelong Learning Programme and coordinated by the University of Rome Sapienza. Results have shown that the foreign language learning process is deeply influenced by the relationships between adults and children. Both children and adults can benefit from the experience which also stimulates a positive attitude towards multilingualism.

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Authors: Maria PARASCA

The objective of the present work is, on the one hand, to compare the Romanian and the German languages for specific purposes, i.e. accounting, based on the specific methods of corpus linguistics, with a focus on their specific professional collocations. On the other hand, I compare these results and underline the benefits of statistical values for the translator of texts for specific purposes, who is educated as a linguist. Statistical values can help the translator separate collocations from more or less fixed phrases, while also serving as an objective basis for decision taking in the translation process, in case of several possible equivalents, to name just two of the possible applications of statistical values in the translation process.