"A face-to-face course is always the best way to learn a language."

The chairs are colourful, the lamps modern and bright, the room well stocked with textbooks, DVDs in various languages and reference books. Robert Wolf, the new director of the Language Centre at the University of Bayreuth, is sitting on one of these colourful chairs in the Language Lounge, the "heart" of the Language Centre, as he says. Here, in the basement of GW I, more is to happen in the future. The lounge is to become even more of a meeting place, a meeting place for language tandems and increasingly a place for autonomous learning.

Changing the external image

"The Language Lounge has been around for a while," says Wolf. "But due to the pandemic, it has been somewhat forgotten." Many of the current students don't even know about the Language Lounge yet, and that's about to change. It is not only the centrepiece that Robert Wolf wants to make better known; overall, he has made it his task to overhaul the external image of the Language Centre.

"I think the first thing we have to do is make the website more modern," he says. Together with his new colleagues and the university's online editors, this should be achieved by moving to the university's new content management system. "But I also want to digitalise the administrative processes in the Language Centre," Wolf explains. But that, too, depends on the new website. In the medium term, the language centre is also to get an Instagram channel to draw students' attention to the language offerings and the Language Lounge and to arouse their interest in perhaps lesser-known languages such as Bambara, Hausa or Korean.

Strengthening the autonomous phase

"A face-to-face course is always the best way to learn a language," Wolf is convinced. Apps and digital offerings, such as units created with H5P or the integration of courses from the Virtual University of Bavaria could help improve vocabulary or grammar, but face-to-face interaction is needed to learn pronunciation correctly or to promote production and interaction. Nevertheless, he can also imagine a change in language courses at the language centre in the long run. "We should strengthen the autonomous phase of the students," says the 33-year-old. At the moment, many language courses are still designed to include four hours with the lecturers per week. "I think three hours together and one hour of free learning time would also fit well," he says. This model already exists for Romance languages, for example. The free study time can then be spent in the Language Lounge, for example.