A major goal of the project is to transfer to all the members of the existing network exisiting local/national solutions to problems common to LWUTLs in the area of vocational language learning, resulting in technologically innovative products for these languages and an enhancement of transnational cooperation in this area.
The project is concerned with the periphery of the EU, together with the linguistic and pedagogic problems associated with this status in the field of language learning. The planned initiative cuts across a wide range of training areas, this adding a second dimension of integration, and will lead to the development of common transnational training tools and methodologies.
The initial areas to be targeted, as perviously mentioned, are:
Areas such as Computer Technology are developing rapidly and new forms of linguistic training and qualifications are needed on account of borrowing from English. Vocational and professional training with a linguistic requirement, in L1 or FL are increasingly in demand, and this initiative will strongly support this development.
The product will be a multilingual package, allowing the learner to select the language of the interface (English, Irish, Greek, Portuguese, German) and to access terms/glosses through any of these languages. English, qua lingua franca, is included to provide a bridge between the languages. Given the intended target user, we hope to incorporate state of the art Speech and Video software as part of a multimedia environment in order to make the product much more attractive and correspondingly useable.
We propose to put on disk, using widely available technology (e.g. MS-Access, MS-Windows ), a multilingual glossary of technical terms for the vocational areas mentioned previously, for the languages of the partners, as part of a self-learning tool encompassing both video and speech technology. Initially we envisage the termbanks containing about 15,000 terms for each named sector. At EU level, the project aims to promote transnational partnerships between institutions responsible for LWUTLs in a vocational context, in order to develop innovatory teaching materials and help in the construction of transnational telematics links and databanks.
The timetable of events as foreseen at this stage is as follows:
As outlined previously, we envisage two meetings at critical periods for the project in February and September in order to maintain focus as we strive towards the fulfillment of the goals of the project.
The renewal report for continued funding of project will be written in August. Assuming this additional funding to be forthcoming, the final stage of the project is foreseen as follows:
We envisage the product being easily extensible to other languages.
When it comes to the dissemination and transfer of the experiences and the products of our project, each of the partners is prominent in their respective countries, and given that (for the most part) these are relatively small, the task of dissemination is unlikely to be onerous. Government Agencies are likely to be interested in having a role in production and dissemination. The cost of the products will be kept to a minimum. With this in mind, the marketing of the product will begin in earnest next year. User groups have already been established, our training centres (FAS and top Schulung) will participate in the evaluation of the product, leading to a working prototype by the end of 1997. It is this prototype which will be the object of the marketing exercise.
January 1997