The lack of proficiency in academic language for the study of the specialist sector often constitutes an obstacle to student mobility and may limit the acquisition of theoretical, technical and professional knowledge during the period of the Erasmus stay in the host institution. This is especially true in the field of Architecture and Construction (AC), where training covers a number of technical sub-fields which are often defined by professional practices, cultural traditions and legal frameworks which are specific to a given country. In such a scenario, while English is still widely used as a lingua franca, proficiency in the national language becomes crucial for removing linguistic and cultural barriers that can hinder the training/learning process and/or discourage student mobility across Europe.
The project aims at creating academic-professional language modules for French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish as a foreign language in the field of AC with a view to encourage student mobility and to improve the outcomes of mobility programs.
The project relies on the use of a variety of methods at each stage, including: semi-automatic creation and annotation of language corpora; automatic extraction of linguistic (lexical, morphological, syntactic and pragmatic) features to inform the learning materials; OER-Platform implementation and testing; survey-based methods for data collection and analysis.
