Valuing All Languages in Europe

The VALEUR project (2004-2007) took as its focus the 'additional' languages of Europe. These are defined as all languages in use in contexts where they are not 'national', 'official', or 'dominant' languages. They include 'migrant' languages, 'regional/minority' languages, sign languages and 'non-territorial' languages of diasporas such as Yiddish and Romani. The project team brought together a range of expertise in sociolinguistics and language pedagogy, planning and research from Finland, Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK. We took as our starting point Council of Europe policies on plurilingualism and the desirability of promoting linguistic diversity both for individual citizenship and for social cohesion in Europe. Our aim was to map provision for additional languages in Europe, in a more systematic and inclusive way than ever before. We looked at provision at school level for different languages in different contexts in order to identify good practices to be shared. In order to achieve our objectives we drew on the good will and enthusiasm of workshop participants, who provided a wealth of information and insights from 21 of the Council of Europe member states. Our work is not definitive: its purpose is awareness-raising and to stimulate further activity to support the learning of all Europe's languages

Legal Terminology and Lesser Used Languages: The Case of Mòcheno

Since 2003 the Institute for Specialised Communication and Multilingualism of the European Academy of Bolzano (EURAC) offers education courses in legal terminology work, coupled with introductions in related/complementary disciplines, e.g. documentation, specialised translation and technical writing. Next to professional trainings, the Institute held also ad-hoc courses, such as a two-day course organised in 2008 for the Mòcheni, a Germanic minority living in the Italian Province of Trento. Since the passing of provincial law no. 6/2008, which foresees specific measures for the protection and promotion of local language minorities, the Mòcheno-speaking community has the right to use their language in all situations of social, economic and administrative life in both oral and written communications. Notwithstanding the recent compilation of a standard grammar, the Mòcheno language is not yet developed for the use in technical and specialised contexts. Indeed, the most urgent needs seem to exist in the translation of administrative terminology

Enabling conditions for professional development of te reo Māori teachers

The paper outlines a professional development programme for secondary school teachers of te reo Māori (under the auspices of Te Hiringa i te Mahara) conducted by a language teacher educator and an expert in Māori bilingualism and biliteracy. While the principles underpinning the programme reflect a strong task-based orientation, the programme approached development needs for the teachers from the point of view of understanding “enabling conditions” (Franken, Rau, Ngata & Parata, n.d.) for effective language learning and teaching (see also Ellis, 2005), rather than understanding task based learning and teaching per se. The programme drew on the current practices of the teachers and made use of epistemology of Māori language and Māori language learning. The paper presents observations from monitoring data collected during the programme supporting the claim that such an approach to the professional development of language teachers promotes a strong knowledge base and pedagogical reasoning skills (Richards, 1998), and in particular for te reo Māori teachers, fosters a sense of their own professional identity

Building on a terminology resource – the Irish experience

www.focal.ie is the national database of Irish language terminology. In this paper, we examine: (i) the impact achieved by this resource in the five year period since work commenced; (ii) the possibilities which have arisen from one project over a short time span, to develop sub-projects and related initiatives; and (iii) the advantages and opportunities arising from the creation of one high-quality electronic language resource. The Irish case shows that the development of high-quality resources for a lesser-used language can have interesting and unexpected knock-on effects. We present eight stages and aspects of term planning: preparation/planning; research; standardisation; dissemination; implantation; evaluation; modernisation/maintenance; and training. Fiontar, in its work,has moved from its initial involvement in the dissemination of terminology, to take an active part in other aspects of term planning for Irish: research, standardisation, evaluation, modernisation and training. This has been achieved through editorial and technological development, in partnership with key stakeholders and always from a socioterminological point of view – that is, with an emphasis on terminology as an aspect of language planning and from the point of view of users in particular. Particular projects described include Focal as a term management system and as a user resource; tools for translators; user links to a corpus; the development of a new sports dictionary; and research into subject field headings. Two related projects are the LEX legal terms project for term extraction and standardisation, and the development of terminology for the European Union

A conceptual architecture for interactive educational multimedia

Learning is more than knowledge acquisition; it often involves the active participation of the learner in a variety of knowledge- and skills-based learning and training activities. Interactive multimedia technology can support the variety of interaction channels and languages required to facilitate interactive learning and teaching. A conceptual architecture for interactive educational multimedia can support the development of such multimedia systems. Such an architecture needs to embed multimedia technology into a coherent educational context. A framework based on an integrated interaction model is needed to capture learning and training activities in an online setting from an educational perspective, to describe them in the human-computer context, and to integrate them with mechanisms and principles of multimedia interaction