Foreign language
knowledge is nowadays extremely essential for the new career briefs
required by the market. Therefore the necessity is strongly felt
to standardize professional competences on an European basis to
allow an innovative knowledge exchange. The market also requires
people to be provided with abilities aimed at widening their professionalism
and, at the same time, developing mutual interaction and unification.
In this context, the On-Lang.Net project is to develop an on-line
evaluation model of language competences, related to modern foreign
languages. The project will be addressed to foreign language and
technical subjects teachers and to all kinds of learners, including
disadvantaged people, who will have the opportunity to test their
competences on-line, and to migrant communities who will profit
from it to improve the host country language.
Teachers will be specifically trained on a multimedia basis to
produce tests and evaluate on-line, to work in a team, using foreign
language communicative situations that will also provide professional
evaluating contexts. A multimedia platform will be created; its
educational core, supplied by a web-based platform, will be made
of tests worked out by the national institutions involved in the
project, according to their own professional and cultural fields.
This material will be structured in relation to its use based on
the integration of the four language skills. The project proposes
the creation of a virtual lab where all the users will find the
appropriate means to communicate and interact.
Using such a platform, educators and learners will be supplied with
instruments and methodologies which will enable them to interact
on an audio, and/or audio-video basis, to create individual learning
monitoring and evaluation processes, and to provide personalized
distance tutoring. The model particularly emphasizes on-line language
skills testing by means of individualized tutoring. This aspect
is extremely relevant as, frequently, distance educational systems
based on new technologies risk minimizing the interaction with the
learner, particularly in relation to testing and evaluation.
One of the most relevant reasons for this project is both to develop
an innovative foreign language e-learning approach, able to support
evaluation by means of technological resources (TELL – Technology-Enhanced
Language Learning) and the need to test skills that can be certificated,
thus producing a communicative and multimedia competence within
the framework of life-long learning. This linguistic-multimedia
educational strategy could be used in traditional curricular courses
and it will support the background of those students involved in
European projects, especially in exchange programs which require
a good language knowledge to comprehend the culture and the professional
fields of the host country. The virtual classrooms will provide
students with appropriate material and resources aiming at evaluating
competences that will be systematically recorded in a personal portfolio.
According to the European Union objectives regarding minority languages,
considering the partnership established by the co-ordinating country,
and the relevant role of some languages within European exchanges,
study cases will be organized using three languages: one of the
“strategic” languages, the Italian language, and one
of the languages of the EU applicant countries. From the early stages
of the project an action-research process - based on the cycle “plan
> act> observe >reflect (and then >plan etc.) will be
applied. This circular approach will involve relevant periods for
dissemination, monitoring and the consequent quality assessment.
Growth and improvement will be guaranteed by a precise evaluation
process (hetero-evaluation, self-evaluation and peer-evaluation
as coexisting and balanced elements) stimulating a high quality
linguistic and professional background, and enhanced by its visibility
and continuous interaction with similar researches.
|
