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Interest  in  traditional  school  languages  such  as  English,  French,  Italian,  and  Spanish  has  changed  considerably  in  the  tertiary  education  sector  over  the last few years. While the number of courses in “small-” and “medium-sized” languages is increasing  and  a  tentative  trend  is  emerging,  particularly  in Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, or Korean,  the  traditional  languages  often  advocated  by the European   Union   are   losing   importance.   Based  on  the  example  of  the  University  of  Graz’s  Centre  for  Language,  Plurilingualism  and  Didactics,  the  development  of  the  “main  languages”  of  English,  French,  Italian,  and  Spanish  is  shown  for  the  period  from  the  2007/2008  academic  year  to  the  2022/2023  academic  year.  An  in-depth  analysis  of  the  course  offerings  and  demand  enables  conclusions to be drawn about students’ behaviour in terms of foreign language learning and leads to considerations  concerning  what  the  primary  motives are for learning or not learning a foreign language.

In this volume, researchers, some of whom have been working in language teaching at universities for many years, take up relevant research topics from language teaching and work on them within the framework of didactic research projects. The project results described are sustainably integrated into language teaching in order to ensure quality development, promote the expansion of teachers' skills and transfer current educational science topics resulting from social transformation processes into a practice-relevant context. This holistically integrative research postulate is not only followed by these didactic research results, but also illustrates the consequences for the didactic educational culture that have resulted, for example, from the Corona crisis or from changes in the target groups of university language courses.

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