On October 23th 2020, IWS joined the online Kick-Off Meeting of SEAH, a 24-month Project co-funded by the Erasmus Plus Programme of the European Commission, which brings together six Partners from different countries (Italy, Spain, Belarus, Czech Republic, France). The KOM, originally planned to be hosted in the headquarters of the University “Gabriele D’annunzio” Chieti-Pescara (Italy), was held in online mode due to COVID-19 restrictions.
The project aims at creating academic-professional language modules for French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish as a foreign language in the field of Architecture and Construction (AC) with a view to encourage student mobility and to improve the outcomes of mobility programs. In fact, the consortium formed by five Higher Education institutions with extensive teaching and research experience in the fields of Applied Linguistics, Teaching Foreign Languages, Corpus Linguistics and Language Learning/Teaching Technology and one private enterprise, Internet Web Solutions (IWS), based in Málaga (Spain) will implement the project’s outputs into two years.
In the first year (IO1), SEAH will create language corpora comprising texts representative of professional and academic communication in AC. In the second year (IO3) each partner university will develop online language teaching modules for AC; throughout the project, the IT partner IWS is in charge of Intellectual Output 2 and will develop, test and update the Multilingual Open Educational Resources (OER) platform which will be used to distribute resources created within the project.
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.
During the meeting, the consortium discussed about the overall project implementation schedule, defining timelines and respective duties in the following months. In particular, the consortium agreed on the choice of the domain name, the web design, the official logo and the main functionalities of the Multilingual OER platform for Architecture and Construction.
IWS is in charge of Intellectual Output 2 and will develop, test and update the Multilingual OER platform which will represent a repository of project’s outputs, results, news and contacts.
