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Purpose: Research on EMI (English-Medium Instruction) has addressed the extent to which content lecturers speaking in their L1 perform as well as when they lecture in English. In this study a lecturer who gave the same lecture in his L1 (Catalan) and English was observed to examine if and how transitioning from one language to another impacts his use of metadiscourse. Methodology: Drawing on Adel’s taxonomy (2010), data from four lectures were obtained to compare the quantity and quality of metadiscursive items in the L1 and EMI lectures. Findings: Findings show that the lecturer made a similar use of metadiscourse across languages of instruction, suggesting that EMI does not always affect the use of metadiscourse. A closer analysis of the content of the lectures suggests that metadiscourse seems to be determined more by the complexity of the lecture content rather than by the language of instruction. Value: These results substantiate the need for bespoke training that accommodates to different lecturer profiles in terms of English proficiency, pedagogy and the complexity of the content to be taught.

Improving students’ writing skill at higher education level in Indonesia through using technology becomes a primary attention given by the researchers. Blog-Assisted Language Learning (BALL) is one of the best alternative medium of improving students’ writing skill. This BALL is never used by the lecturers who are teaching writing skill to students at State Islamic University of Ar-Raniry, Banda Aceh. Therefore, the objectives of this study are to investigate if there is a significant different between students who are taugh by using Bog-Assisted Language Learning (BALL) and without in term of students’ writing skill at State Islamic University of Ar-Raniry, Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Additionally, this study also investigates the students’ response toward the use of BALL in teaching and learning process of writing skill. The study involved 40 third year English students of the State Islamic University of Ar-Raniry, Banda Aceh. The study employed quantitative method in collecting the data through pre-and post-writing tests and a set of questionnaire for both groups; experiment and control. The data collected were analysed using descriptive statistic. The results showed that the use of BALL in teaching writing improved significantly rather than students who were taught without using BALL. In addition, the majority of students’ response toward the implementation of BALL in teaching writing skill were positive. Therefore, the use of BALL in teaching and learning writing at English Department students of State Islamic University of Ar-Raniry can improve students’ writing skill.

S'ha vist que en totes les comunitats on s'estudia el grau d'òptica i optometria i en les quals es parlen dues llengües oficials, es dona l'opció d'impartir aquests estudis en les dues modalitats. No obstant això, en el cas del País Basc, al no tenir cap facultat d'òptica i optometria, manca del coneixement dels termes optomètrics en l'idioma local. Aquest treball té com a objectiu conèixer les mancances idiomàtiques en l'àmbit òptic del País Basc. Se ha visto que en todas las comunidades donde se estudia el grado de óptica y optometría y en las que se hablan dos lenguas oficiales, se da la opción de impartir dichos estudios en las dos modalidades. Sin embargo, en el caso del País Vasco, al no tener ninguna facultad de óptica y optometría, carece del conocimiento de los términos optométricos en el idioma local. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo conocer las carencias idiomáticas en el ámbito óptico del País Vasco. It has been seen that in all the communities where the degree in optics and optometry is studied and in which two official languages are spoken, the option of teaching these studies in both modalities is given. However, in the case of the Basque Country, since it has no faculty of optics and optometry, it lacks the knowledge of optometric terms in the local language. The aim of this work is to find out the language deficiencies in the optical field in the Basque Country.

With the ultimate aim of finding ways to improve the systematic integration of linguistic and cultural competencies in engineering education, this paper addresses how culture and language competency education is discussed within a technical European University Alliance and how this discourse is translated – or not – into educational initiatives and activities. By doing this, we aim to put focus on the gap between a certain European Union ideology – “united in diversity” – which is at the very heart of the EU project, and the everyday practices at technical universities, where linguistic and cultural competency education are often considered as marginal activities or elective add-ons compared to the hard core of technical subjects. The paper is based on European University Alliance documents and the observations and experiences made within one alliance’s working group on cultural and linguistic training during 2020-2022. We suggest that the gap between the rhetoric of multilingualism and multiculturalism and the reality of teaching and learning within the alliance has at least two sources: a tendency to engage in magical thinking where global competence develops “spontaneously” in international settings and a tendency to avoid addressing difficult questions, e.g., what multilingualism and multiculturalism actually mean in contemporary engineering education. This paper will provide some of the crucial questions that need addressing if we want to move beyond the empty rhetoric, as well as some practical suggestions for a systematic integration of cultural and linguistic competency education into engineering education.

English-medium instruction (EMI) affects lecturers’ classroom practices as they face a new teaching scenario where language(s) can be used to construct lecturers’ identities. Therefore, lecturers can take up different identities because their language-choice acts depend on their communicative and identification purposes. Employing Membership-Categorisation Analysis (MCA) to examine classroom interaction, this paper examines the classroom practices of one EMI lecturer to explore how the orientation towards one language over the others implies a specific function associated with a particular identity. The alternation between languages reveals to what extent EMI lecturers accept or challenge the English-only policy and how lecturers position themselves as English-only or as translanguaging lecturers. This study documents lecturer’s teaching behaviour, particularly how L1-choice acts can be more effective for certain purposes. Studying how lecturers draw from both their EMI-lecturer identity and their L1-lecturer identity, this paper shows how multilingual practices unfold in EMI and highlights the pedagogical value of the L1, hence advocating that the use of languages other than English has, after all, a particular purpose.

L'he posat en accés obert a petició de Marina Casadevall, que ha rebut la demanda del tutor i ho ha confirmat amb l'estudiant. Abans estava en mode restringit (Montse Moragas 26.07.22)

The growing internationalization of study and work settings has led to increased university internationalization, making it necessary to explore the language and communication skills that higher education students need, and more importantly, how their confidence can be boosted to effectively participate in international academic and professional communication. As universities tend to favor EMI (English-Medium Instruction) as a way of developing students’ disciplinary communication skills and rarely incorporate ESP (English for Specific Purposes) as part of their policies, a question arises about the role of ESP courses and their potential for developing intercultural communication and internationalization skills. This chapter inquires into whether and how ESP courses can be integrated into university internationalization policies with the aim to help students towards the development of disciplinary English. In order to find out what skills students perceive as necessary for international academic and professional communication, this study investigates how these courses are implemented in a technical university, from the perspective of students’ views. Data come from a survey on ESP students’ self-reported preparation (and level of confidence), their EMI/international experience and their use of English for academic and professional purposes. Complementarily, this study also examines the position of ESP in the curriculum and in broader institutional language and internationalization policies. From the results obtained, a proposal is made for aligning ESP with broader institutional internationalization strategies, so that ESP courses can contribute to developing transferable skills that impact on graduates’ international employability, which makes ESP even more relevant in current internationalized scenarios.

In the European Project Semester (EPS), communication is key. It is through continuous communication that project teams can plan and develop their projects, involving supervisors and companies in internationalized contexts. Furthermore, project outcomes are defined in the form of communication artifacts, typically a written report and an oral presentation, both of which are assessed in terms of their contents and communicative value. Set in the context of the EPS programme at UPC, this chapter situates TPC in engineering education and identifies communication practices as part of the professional practices of engineers. After presenting the main approaches to TPC in engineering, the chapter discusses how TPC is approached from a problem-solving perspective. The rationale and organization of the TPC course are presented, together with examples of tasks based on a practical methodology that promotes familiarization, practice, reflection and dialogue. From the principles discussed, a specific proposal is made for integrating TPC in EPS and similar capstone programmes. From an interdisciplinary perspective, this chapter reflects on the importance of TPC in engineering education, the requirements of globalized professional settings and the pervasiveness of digitalization, to discuss how engineering students can effectively engage in international engineering communication. Objectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::4 - Educació de Qualitat Objectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::4 - Educació de Qualitat::4.3 - Per a 2030, assegurar l’accés en condicions d’igualtat per a tots els homes i dones a una formació tècnica, professional i superior de qualitat, inclòs l’ensenyament universitari Objectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::9 - Indústria, Innovació i Infraestructura Objectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::9 - Indústria, Innovació i Infraestructura::9.1 - Desenvolupar infraestructures fiables, sostenibles, resilients i de qualitat, incloent infraestructures regionals i transfrontereres, per tal de donar suport al desenvolupament econòmic i al benestar humà, amb especial atenció a l’accés assequible i equitatiu per a totes les persones

This study documents the perceptions and self-expressed experiences of eleven Catalan university students as they shift from learning in their first language(s), Catalan and/or Spanish, to learning in English. The paper presents a qualitative analysis of students’ reflections in relation to: how disciplinary knowledge is transmitted and learned in English-medium instruction (EMI); the multilingual dynamics employed in the EMI class by both lecturers and students; the Englishlanguage teaching and learning events; and perceptions of students’ own and their classmates’ performance. It outlines the main foci identified through thematic data analysis (Airey, 2011; Saldaña, 2013) of students’ responses to a set of questions, considering their personal opinions regarding the implementation of EMI subjects as part of the internationalisation process of the university and offering the students’ general views and concerns about content subjects taught in English. The findings suggest that students have a generally positive perspective on EMI subjects and they assign a pedagogical value to the L1(s). Yet, the paper also reports several students’ concerns in relation to EMI implementation. Overall, these findings may lead to a better and deeper understanding of EMI in the context under study. The data discussed in this paper are from the project entitled Towards an empirical assessment of the impact of English medium instruction at university: Language learning, disciplinary knowledge and academic identities (ASSEMID). The project was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (El Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad MINECO), code FFI2016-76383-P (30 Dec 2016–29 Dec 2019).

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is one of the advanced approaches of Machine Translation (MT) that has recently gained popularity. A significant amount of parallel corpus is required to achieve a sound translation system, but most languages have a deficit worldwide. Many SoTA NMT systems are available for low-resource langauges that are developed using transfer learning, knowledge transfer, and zero-shot learning mechanisms. Most Indic languages fall into low-resource and zero-resource due to the non-availability of rich parallel and monolingual corpora. Though many Indian border languages have social and economic significance, they lack resources and automated machine translation systems. Kashmiri, one such Indian border language, belongs to the zero-resource category with limited corpora and no significant translation system. This paper uses pre-trained word embeddings to create the first NMT system specifically for Kashmiri-English and Kashmiri-Hindi translation. mBPE pre-trained word embeddings for Kashmiri language are used to develop the NMT system. A pre-trained word embedding model shows +2.58 BLEU improvisation in comparison to Vanilla NMT.

An approach to technical and professional learning that recognizes and makes use of the social and material contexts of participants as well as the contexts of technical and professional content in the learning environment can be seen to cater to the ‘21st century skills’ that are ‘needed most’, according to the World Economic Forum (Soffel, 2016) at this time of great change (Schwab & Malleret, 2020). Such an approach will be presented here: drawing primarily on epistemic fluency (Markauskaite and Goodyear 2017), but also scientific autobiography (Goetz, 2019), ethics (Gardner, 2019), critical pedagogy (Freire, 2005), hermeneutics (Ricoeur, 1991), and a work of conceptual art (Micu, 2014). The approach is connected to technical and professional communication by its focus on the relational skills that facilitate and enrich work conducted in multiple contexts. It is distilled into three categories that present the epistemic tasks and tools that can be applied as backgrounding to learning environments. These categories are: creative relational skills, conscientious direction, and dialogic curiosity. Practical application is then illustrated through three examples of TAPP collaborations.

Higher education institutions are doing a disservice to their students if they are not training students in cross-cultural competencies. In this research, the authors surveyed respondents who have worked within educational and business-related globally distributed, cross-cultural/cross-language teams to learn of the ways teams communicate using technology in remote interactions. The researchers used content analysis of survey results to examine the data for patterns and assessment in how online connections allow multicultural/multilingual collaborators to work together in collaborative environments that include traditional and non-traditional communication styles while examining the environments for clear communication and accessibility for globally-distributed teams. Best practices emanated from the research and the literature are presented.

This mixed-methods study aims to explore the assessment strategies and tools teachers use to assess student learning in Virtual exchange (VE) in foreign/second language for specific purposes (FLSP) courses at tertiary level. The quantitative data were collected by means of a purpose-designed questionnaire that focused on assessment tools teachers used in order to give feedback to students involved in a VE project. The questionnaire data was supplemented with oral interviews with language teachers from diverse cultural backgrounds and aimed at eliciting more in-depth information about the planning of the assessment process, the form of assessment (e.g. summative or formative) and feedback provision. The results indicate that the teachers tend to perceive assessment as a formative process and apply assessment tools that focus on both content and language components, and encourage reflective practice and collaboration.

Academic virtual exchanges provide opportunities to meet with increasing demands on higher education establishments to internationalize (O’Dowd, 2016; Helm, 2016). The present study considers an example of internationalization for home students at Bordeaux University, France, who participated in the Erasmus + Virtual Exchange programme from 2019-21. Erasmus virtual exchange enables students to participate in study mobility programmes without having to physically travel abroad to engage in intercultural communicative situations. The Erasmus Virtual Exchange programme (EVE), which focused on the theme of Cultural Encounters, marks the new ‘critical’ turn in intercultural exchange (O’Dowd, 2016; Helm, 2016). In this context, French speaking Chemistry Masters students interacted in English on this topic via weekly 2-hour webinars with other non-native English-speaking students from other participating universities in Europe and the Mediterranean region. Virtual exchange therefore offered the students the opportunity to go beyond English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in relation to Chemistry, and to use the transversal skills that EVE can offer for the workplace, including ‘soft skills’ and intercultural competence (Nye, 2004; Martin & Nakayama, 2015). Consequently, the study addresses how virtual exchanges incite wider language and pedagogical perspectives for students at Bordeaux University. The methods used to address the research question were the qualitative analysis of the students’ reflective journals, questionnaire feedback on the programme and focus groups with both students and staff involved. The study reveals new challenges for educators preparing future graduates for a complex multi-lingual and multi-cultural learning environment where English is the current lingua franca. The study also shows that students described virtual exchange as more authentic than the interactions they had previously experienced within the ESP classroom because they were not able to revert to their L1 and because of the transformative features of the EVE course (Nolet, 2015).

Cosmopolitanism has historically been associated with politics. Cosmopolitanism refers to the idea that humans share the universe and are obligated to serve one another due to the shared goal of well-being. Cosmopolitan principles have valuable application in the study of health communications distributed to intercultural and multicultural audiences because communications that address global health issues are complex, situated in a context, and must be usable by a diversity of individuals. Cosmopolitanism addresses the dynamic, collaborative, and ethical considerations that are required to study intercultural and multicultural health communications. Key aspects of cosmopolitan research are discussed followed by an example of cosmopolitan research in practice.

This study shall focus primarily on the 24 language versions of the European Union (EU) Regulations on Private International Law (PIL). These Regulations are generally directly applied in all Member States. This means that national legal practitioners (judges, lawyers, notaries, registrars, judicial systems) use their language version directly when applying these Regulations and thus when applying it to private relations between citizens and companies. This should guarantee the achievement of a European Legal Area. However, despite the unification of European PIL legislation, uniform application is not guaranteed. In our understanding, this is due to a number of factors: a) Inconsistencies and errors across the 24 language versions of the regulations (errors, vertical and horizontal consistency as well as matching across all language versions). In this short paper there is an example. b) A lack of unified definitions in substantive European PIL, and a consequent lack of vertical consistency (not linguistically but substantively vis-a-vis other regulations and directives) which would favour the technical requirements of application. While EU legislation cannot technically ensure uniformity in the use of concepts, this situation gives rise to implementation difficulties, as national legal practitioners are faced with definitions that differ depending on the instrument, and are variance with those of their own domestic law. This can lead to misapplication of EU law.

As the demand for healthcare workers fluent in foreign languages continues to grow, so does the necessity for successful educational programs that produce providers with the appropriate language skills and cultural humility to serve the target population. Given the interdisciplinary nature of teaching languages for specific purposes, we propose a model of collaboration between experts in the different fields involved to train well-rounded professionals. In the particular case of languages for healthcare, professionals in both the medical and language learning fields should combine their expertise to offer students a well-integrated training that builds on their medical education at the same time that it provides them with meaningful opportunities to practice and develop their language and culture skills. While this paper focuses on Spanish, the main points discussed in it can be applied to teaching any language in the healthcare setting.

When discussing translation, theory and practice seem at opposite ends. However, a mediation between the two cannot be discarded when designing and planning a postgraduate translation course. Translation teaching, though a relatively recent field, has traditional methods and manuals. In 2014, Kiraly argued for a revision of his cognitivist approach to translation teaching (first claimed in Pathways to translation, 1995) and its focus on mental translation processes, to embrace a constructivist perspective whereby meaning and knowledge are built in social interactions. Acknowledging previous research and aiming to stimulate students’ participation, a 30-hour theory and practice translation postgraduate module was designed. Flipped class activities and the World Café technique were implemented, aiming at dealing with short translation tasks (practice) alongside a focus on historical approaches and methods (theory) via selected readings from Venuti’s The Translation Studies Reader (2000). This research makes a case for the effectiveness of World café, a collaborative learning methodology, and of flipped class as a useful complement. The intention is to describe such teaching/learning strategies and the authentic assessment adopted alongside them to offer some provisional thoughts on the impact such learning experience had on students.

The internationalisation process of higher education institutions has prompted the implementation of the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach, where instruction occurs in a language other than students’ mother tongue (Coyle, Hood & Marsh, 2010). Previous research on CLIL focused on learners’ outcomes as a final product (Lahuerta, 2020). Nonetheless, current research delves into the learning process itself (Nikula & Moore, 2016). The aim of this study is to examine translanguaging functions in CLIL seminars delivered in History and Nursing degrees at a Spanish university. These practices have been audio-recorded and transcribed for the purpose of this study. As for the participants, there bilingual and multilingual strategies are expected in the learning environment. Results have been interpreted qualitatively to describe participants’ discourse in detail. The analysis of this corpus shows some similarities and differences in terms of interaction and production. Teacher-student interaction and student-student interaction is determined by participants’ command of the target language. These findings may be useful for scholars and educators concerned with the design of effective CLIL programmes in higher education.

Multimodality is at the core of the wide range of digital skills that higher education students need to foster. As interdisciplinary skills, digital skills can help students develop communication skills in general, and disciplinary communication in a foreign language in particular. What this paper sets out to show is that in the context of an ESP class, a multimodal task is an efficient tool to encourage student engagement through the authoring of multimodal texts. Indeed, as Plastina (2013) writes, “The opportunity of authoring multimodal texts by coherently integrating different digital media elements (texts, graphics, sound, animation and video) is becoming a popular practice among the net generation. (…) developing multimodal communicative competence now needs to be at the forefront of ESP.” (pp. 378-379). Using the examples of two ESP task-based projects, that of the creation of a video abstract in a class of ESP for plant biology students at Master’s level on the one hand, and of the creation of a vlog in a class of ESP for trainee physical education teachers, this paper will analyse what is at stake in such tasks, through the concepts of code-switching and creating authoring. I will analyse the efficiency of the digital shift as a didactic tool, making students active participants in the authoring of their video artefacts. Students’ digital skills and disciplinary skills develop at the same time, exemplifying the idea that “digital literacies are critical to fully access the literacies required for disciplinary learning.” (Manderino & Castek, 2016, p. 79).

Dramatization as a technique in the Spanish as a Foreign Language (ELE) courses has amply demonstrated its benefits. In this text, a didactic approach is developed for the Spanish courses for medical purposes to ensure that students can successfully carry out a medical consultation. This approach has been put into practice in university courses and the final pedagogical result has been really satisfactory.

Despite a growing interest in English-medium instruction (EMI), research on students’ English language proficiency advancement in EMI has been scarce. Hence, this study investigates the general and business English language proficiency of EMI and non-EMI students at a Croatian university at the beginning and the end of their BA studies, with the aim of analysing and comparing their English language progress. The data were collected by means of a questionnaire looking at the students’ experiences, expectations and language self-assessment, the Oxford Quick Placement Test, as well as a C-test and a business English test designed by the authors of the study. Interviews with the students were also conducted to further enquire into the data gathered from the questionnaire and the tests. The findings point to greater English language proficiency of EMI students at the beginning and the end of their BA studies, and to their better progress in business English. They also reveal non-EMI students’ greater progress in general English.

Fondées sur des recherches développées au sein de la terminologie, nous avons étudié l'équivalence des termes nommant les régimes matrimoniaux brésiliens et français afin de vérifier les différences et les ressemblances entre eux. Nous avons donc vérifié que cette terminologie a des aspects sémantiques et socioculturels qui sont semblables mais non complètement égaux.

En la Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, la enseñanza de inglés se centra en la lectocomprensión del discurso científico, por lo que reconoce el rol preponderante de la activación de conocimientos previos para promover así la elaboración de hipótesis de lectura y una posterior conceptualización eficaz. Los artículos de investigación suelen apelar –especialmente en sus títulos– a estructuras compuestas por sintagmas nominales complejos que identifican y refieren al contenido del estudio, por lo que su tratamiento constituye una de las primeras estrategias de nuestro abordaje. Desde una perspectiva contrastiva, las funciones sintácticas que diferencian las nominalizaciones en inglés de las ocurrentes en español suscitan dificultades significativas en el plano semántico-pragmático. Para comprobar si una intervención pedagógica específica propicia la construcción de sentido, se desarrolló una taxonomía de sintagmas nominales según su grado de complejidad. Presentaremos los resultados y las conclusiones de un estudio experimental, aleatorio y controlado respecto de la incidencia de la instrucción específica sobre las nominalizaciones complejas en el que hemos utilizado dos metodologías de análisis diferenciadas: categorización cualitativa y descomposición discursiva en ‘ideas-unidad’.

This paper examines a Virtual Exchange (VE) amongst 42 participants which took place with University of Limerick business students and Universidad of León tourism students. The primary aims of the VE were the development of disciplinary, language and intercultural skills. As part of the VE, students had to carry out a series of telecollaborative tasks over 10 weeks. For both groups, the final product of this project was a promotional video exhibiting places within Ireland and Spain. The main objective here was to attract tourism based on sustainable practices while learning and promoting their own heritage and local communities. This paper presents the project design, the tasks that the students carried out, together with some of the learning outcomes. This VE between students of the same age, sharing similar modules and personal interests, and with a strong curiosity for each other’s language and culture was highly motivational. The VE achieved the objectives of developing intercultural awareness and professional skills while covering curricula contents and objectives.

Legal concepts are generally deeply rooted in a specific legal system. Even when two legal systems use the same official language, such as Germany and Austria, the system-boundness of their legal concepts may lead to communication problems. German is also an officially recognised minority language in South Tyrol, Italy. In South Tyrol, the local public authorities must use the minority language in their relations with German-speaking citizens. This brought about the need to elaborate a local German legal terminology to express Italian legal concepts. Terminology development efforts intended to promote terminology consistency and avoid an excessive regionalisation of South Tyrolean German, so as to foster communication with the neighbouring German-speaking legal systems. In the last decades, European Union law has led to a growing harmonisation in the legal terminologies of its Member States, facilitating communication between the different legal systems, also with benefits for terminology work in South Tyrol. This paper focuses on how European legal acts impact on national legal terminology and affect German legal terminology in South Tyrol. The considerations set out are based on comparative legal terminology work regarding the Italian and the German-speaking legal systems done at Eurac Research.

English-medium instruction (EMI) is a growing trend in Catalan universities. This “internationalization at home” (Nilsson, 2003) context has important implications at several levels regarding university language policy and actual practices. The chief consequence is that the classes are taught mostly in English by local instructors. Also, the presence of international participants in the classroom requires the use of English as a lingua franca when these exchange students interact in the classroom alongside local students in participation settings such as teamwork. The scope of this paper focuses on this second set of practices in order to analyze how local and international students interact in small collaborative groups to jointly produce a task in English, as assigned by the instructor. Using an emic and qualitative approach based on conversation analysis (Sacks, 1992), this paper analyzes how students manage and display the plurilingual resources at their disposal to jointly engage in knowledge construction in internationalized settings (Borràs et al., 2012; Gajo, 2007; Masats et al., 2007). Results seem to indicate that despite asymmetric competences in the English language, students engage in fruitful cooperation towards the resolution of the task assigned by the instructor. The plurilingual practices observed during the interaction in independent teamwork seem to be a help, not a hindrance, towards developing solid competence in the L2.

The global spread of English, which began some time ago, has in recent years come to be fused with the neoliberalisation of higher education (HE) and the introduction and implementation of internationalisation policies in universities worldwide. One key feature of these internationalisation policies is Englishisation, the use of English in an increasing number of domains of activity, English-medium instruction (EMI) being a prime example. EMI is by now a much-researched phenomenon and there has been an exponential increase in publications focusing on it in a range of contexts and from a multitude of angles (e.g. curricular issues, teaching practice, lecturer identity, etc.). Nevertheless, what is too often missing in publications is a questioning of certain taken-for-granted assumptions, not least that EMI should and must exist. In this paper, based on my plenary paper at the 2021 AELFE-TAPP conference, I examine and critique this existential assumption, along with others, drawing on my reading of relevant literature and my participation in a research project exploring EMI in action.

translationQ is a computer-assisted revision tool developed by the Belgian company Televic and the KU Leuven Faculty of Arts. Similar to computer-assisted translation tools, the software can automatically detect translation errors by identifying any possible matches between the target segments and the items saved by the human reviser in a revision memory. This is aimed at speeding up the revision work, reducing the task repetitiveness and increasing the consistency or revisions (van Egdom, 2021, pp. 214–215), especially for large volumes of translations, and ultimately objectify the translation assessment (Akbari & Shahnazari, 2019). The University of Padova is one of the fist having implemented this software for the revision of MA-level specialised translations. Drawing on a preliminary empirical testing, this paper will report on the implications of using translationQ for the (summative) revision (Hatim & Mason, 1997, p. 166; Durieux 1998, cited in Saridakis & Kostopoulou, 2003) of large volumes of translations. More specifically, the adaptation of the revision procedure to the software architecture will be examined, with special reference to the advantages and limits resulting from the implementation of technology in the revision workflow for teaching and research purposes. Also, the paper will suggest how the software can be successfully integrated in the specialised translation class to help trainees develop thematic competence (EMT Expert Group, 2009) through the discussion and analysis of terminological and phraseological errors.

When virtual exchange projects pair up L1 English speakers and ELF speakers, the first can be implicitly positioned as language experts, the second as learners. But ELF speakers are often more experienced in negotiating spoken and written communication. Are speakers of native English equally prepared to accommodate ELF speakers? This consideration inspired a project that connected students in the US with students in Italy. These students recorded spoken interactions that we analyzed to explore how the students used specific communication strategies (CS). Results show that ELF speakers efficiently used CSs, especially self-rephrasing, a key self-repair strategy based on pre-empting problems of understanding in ELF. Compared to L1 English speakers, ELF speakers proved to be more resourceful and more adept at transforming spoken communication into an act of mediation. Training in ELF did help the L1 English speakers adjust their speech, but these students need more extensive and systematic training to develop their communication skills in ELF interactions.

In the shift to English-medium instruction (EMI) in European higher education, policy often runs ahead of research and curricular decisions are taken independent of evidence regarding their suitability for achieving broader educational goals, which may range from internationalisation as a general strategy to English language learning as a more specific one. Where English language learning is a goal, EMI may be CLILised, that is, it is adopted not only for content delivery, but also as a means through which students might improve their English. Drawing on interviews and classroom observations, and employing a Membership Categorisation Analysis methodology, this paper examines how a lecturer in agronomic engineering at a Catalan university experiences CLILised EMI. It documents how the lecturer positions himself as a content lecturer and how categories are produced and negotiated in interviews and classroom practices. Among other things, the paper shows that while the lecturer refuses to inhabit an English-language teacher identity, he nonetheless acts in this capacity when he focusses on vocabulary learning through the provision of glossaries and translation. These and other findings point to a more general disjuncture between policy and practice, which, it is argued, needs to be addressed by university administrators and EMI lecturers.

This article draws on Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Project (TAPP) collaborations (e.g., [Arnó, 14] [Vandepitte, 16]) to show how students in already-existing technical communication classes can join other classes in realistic transnational projects through ICT and thereby acquire and enhance various types of transversal competences necessary to students’ future performance in a globalized workplace.

© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. To present technical content clearly and effectively for global users of English, engineering students need to learn how. About the case: Technical communication classes in Spain and the US engaged in an international telecollaborative project between cross-cultural virtual teams in which students in Spain developed oral presentations that were then peer-reviewed by counterparts in the US Situating the case: Research on international professional communication and, more specifically, virtual exchange is rapidly growing to explore how instructors can help students gain key competencies such as audience awareness, intercultural sensitivity, and an understanding of English as a lingua franca. Approach/methods: As part of the Trans-Atlantic & Pacific Project network, this project focused on spoken communication. Data were analyzed from feedback forms used by US students to evaluate oral presentations, and on prelearning and postlearning reports completed by students in Spain, as well as from class discussions accompanying the project. Results/discussion: Through reflections on pragmatic strategies that facilitate exchange and collaboration in English as a lingua franca, the engineering students became more fully aware of the importance of rhetorical and linguistic factors that affect meaning-making for engineers internationally. Conclusion: Results suggest that students who participate in transnational virtual exchange projects integrate their desire to acquire knowledge with an awareness of the importance of sharing knowledge through mindful and inclusive communication practices. Technical and engineering communication instructors from different countries can heighten their students’ audience awareness, and cultural and language sensitivities through such projects

In contrast to medical interpreting, there is much less information on translators’ beliefs about how to translate written medical content and how these beliefs differ from the translation preferences and expectations of health professionals. Investigating translators’ beliefs is nevertheless important if we want a more nuanced understanding of how translators’ choices are influenced by how they believe they should translate and what they believe health professionals expect from them. Adopting a sociological and philosophical approach to the study of expectations, this paper reports on the findings from a survey investigating novice translators’ beliefs about medical and biomedical translation from English to European Portuguese. The data suggests that translators’ beliefs about how they think they should translate do not coincide with their expectations about how readers believe they should translate. The research results represent a further step towards a fuller picture of the role of expectations about medical translation, as well as having implications for translators' training.

This short paper begins with a brief overview of the expansion of the field of virtual exchange. It then focuses on a recent European policy experiment which sought to expand the scope of the well known Erasmus+ mobility programme through the Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange pilot project. Both the challenges and the opportunities that this project provided from a research perspective are highlighted as well as some of the relevant findings, in particular those related to the themes of the conference such as the preparation of future graduates for multicultural work and study environments.

Translators and technical communicators must be prepared to use immersive technologies as they work. Visualization has been shown to help translators improve their performance as it provides a more concrete understanding of topic and content (Kußmaul, 2005). In addition, use of augmented and/or virtual reality (AR, VR) has been shown to help technical communicators develop intercultural communication competence (Tham et al., 2018). However, understanding of immersive technologies has not kept pace with the full potential of their benefits and perils (Craig & Georgieva, 2018). Here we ask: How might students examine and/or use immersive technologies as a means to foster intercultural communication and improve translation performance? In this presentation we share two research projects on the design, deployment, and study of student use of immersive technologies as a means to foster intercultural communication and improve translation understanding. Project one focuses on multiple years of TAPP collaborations in which U.S. students at the University of Minnesota (UMN) collaborated with translation teams at the University of Trieste (UT) in Italy. Students used immersive technologies including Google Cardboard and marker-based AR, and most recently, developed visualizations of translation journeys. Project two details two years of U.S.-Canada collaboration in which U.S. students from multiple institutions curated collections on emerging technologies and translation for the digital repository The Fabric of Digital Life (Iliadis & Pedersen, 2018) housed at Ontario Tech University in Canada. Here we share student collections of artifacts on immersive technologies, both emergent and commercialized, with specific focus on translation. Together, these pedagogical deployments provide a framework for advancing intercultural communication and translation performance through use and examination of immersive technologies.

Working in a multidisciplinary collaborative project through virtual exchange encompasses many advantages as well as some disadvantages. One of the many problems that might occur in virtual cooperation settings was identified as cultural mismatches, listed by Chase, Macfadyen, Reeder, and Roche (2002) into nine categories. Some of these mismatches were found during the Trans-Atlantic Pacific Project1 (TAPP), a collaborative and active learning bidirectional platform, where students from Portuguese and North American universities have been cooperating for several years to enhance their technical and linguistic competences whilst developing intercultural skills. By bringing together future Translators and Technical Writers into a multicultural simulated setting, students are given the opportunity to learn from each other and interact via technology-mediated communication. Yet, this endeavour revealed to be extremely demanding mostly due to cultural misunderstandings that occurred during virtual communication exchanges. Accordingly, a cultural mediation intervention plan was developed and implemented by the authors as a strategy to overcome these problems and strengthen virtual teamwork interaction. This plan was designed to raise cultural awareness of the self and the other and was divided into 4 separate phases: 1) the cultural awareness initial stage, followed by 2) peer-to-peer exchange of the pre-learning questionnaires, 3) the completion of the Cultural Self-Awareness Questionnaire, concluding with 4) the analysis of the results and discussion in class. This study addresses the Cultural Self-Awareness Questionnaire. The results and outcomes of this questionnaire are analysed and discussed and new avenues for research will be presented and proposed.

This paper describes the submission to the WMT 2021 news translation shared task by the UPC Machine Translation group. The goal of the task is to translate German to French (De-Fr) and French to German (Fr-De). Our submission focuses on fine-tuning a pre-trained model to take advantage of monolingual data. We fine-tune mBART50 using the filtered data, and additionally, we train a Transformer model on the same data from scratch. In the experiments, we show that fine-tuning mBART50 results in 31.69 BLEU for De-Fr and 23.63 BLEU for Fr-De, which increases 2.71 and 1.90 BLEU accordingly, as compared to the model we train from scratch. Our final submission is an ensemble of these two models, further increasing 0.3 BLEU for Fr-De.

Academic writing is challenging for many university students in any language, but it is especially difficult for students whose instruction language is still on its way to normalisation and has an unstable academic discourse, such as Basque. This paper explains how corpora can be exploited to raise these students' linguistic awareness. To that end, learning objectives are defined, corpora-based exercises are designed, and the difficulties that students overcome are observed. The focus of this paper are students of scientific and technological degrees in the courses on Basque for Academic Purposes, where they are taught how to solve lexical, grammatical, stylistic and register-related doubts. The final aim of the course is that these students become aware of the functional development of Basque, so that they contribute to it in their professional careers.

Teaching vocabulary is particularly important in tertiary English for specific purposes (ESP) education, as technical terms form the foundation for oral and written communication in disciplines, professions, and projects. Becoming accurate and fluent in speaking and writing about subject-specific content requires extended linguistic instruction and opportunities to practise the language, which is why engineering students need to be enabled to participate in ESP courses in their academic degree programmes. This talk, therefore, reviews some vocabulary teaching techniques and illustrates pedagogical scenarios for teaching technical terminology. It thus caters for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines in higher education, but its contents may be transferred to other academic subject areas or in-service training courses in industry. The main scenario presented revolves around a TED talk video file on technology and society, whereas two further TED video files adopt a narrower focus on 3D-printing in aircraft design and removing CO2 from the atmosphere. TED talk files are permanently archived, accessible online, and accompanied by transcripts. The teaching sequences under consideration involve discussion questions, note-taking of facts and figures from the talks, an analysis of key vocabulary and phrases, using key terms in discussing aspects of the talks, and preparing arguments and counter-arguments related to the speaker’s view. These teaching scenarios may be complemented with homework assignments or integrated into several lessons treating the same thematic strand. The major objectives of this talk are revisiting an essential area of ESP and exchanging techniques from tertiary pedagogical practice. It may be characterised as a methodological contribution rooted in teaching experience, thus resembling a concept talk rather than a research presentation. Instead of research data and results, it focuses on pedagogical aspects and the spreading of good teaching practice among tertiary ESP professionals.

Esta comunicación aborda cómo las estudiantes utilizan el método de traducción en el aula para aprender una lengua extranjera. Aquí se analiza el aprendizaje de las estudiantes, cuya lengua materna es el árabe, como aprendientes de una segunda lengua extranjera (español) a través de su primera lengua extranjera (inglés). El objetivo central es no sólo resaltar los problemas relacionados con la comprensión de ciertos aspectos del significado en sí sino en el proceso de doble traducción que se produce en la clase de ELE. En un aula donde el profesor no habla árabe, este perfil de estudiantes acude a la traducción como mecanismo de comunicación y aprendizaje. Se parte, pues, de una metodología basada en una sinergia de experiencias docentes en Qatar que, junto a previos estudios, analiza cómo la traducción, el contexto y la cultura juegan un papel de relevancia en el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras; del mismo modo, cómo el estudiantado utiliza la traducción con el fin de desarrollar la competencia lingüística, traductológica e intercultural. Con el fin de ejemplificar este trabajo, se utiliza la gramática y la literatura dado que se explica cómo las estudiantes traducen y establecen una comparación tanto entre tres sistemas gramaticales como tres culturas diferentes junto a los retos a los que se enfrentan. Se va a analizar el método de enseñanza de la literatura española a través del inglés como lengua vehicular para arabófonos. Los investigadores proponen ejemplos derivados de obras canónicas como El Lazarillo de Tormes o La Celestina de la mano de las dificultades que surgen cuando se traducen conceptos como la picaresca o el buen amor. En conclusión, en un aula donde la traducción es la única vía de comunicación, ¿hasta qué punto es válido el uso de la traducción como método de enseñanza de lenguas y sus literaturas?

This paper investigates the ways in which argumentation is dealt with in English and Italian by comparing and contrasting a comparable/parallel corpus of texts on genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Pragmatic discourse strategies are explored in a comparable corpus of GMO texts written by US students and in translations Italian students made as part of a virtual exchange or tele-collaboration project. The project involved students in a US university writing argumentative texts on GMOs and students at an Italian university translating them. Corpus data suggest that – faced with unfamiliar, culturally different arguments about GMOs in US texts – trainee translators had to address issues concerning pragmatics and had to use a cultural filter (House 2006) to produce translations that read like target language originals and met target language expectations.

As the Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Project (TAPP) celebrates its twentieth anniversary, it is helpful to reflect on what its members have accomplished and where future TAPP partnerships might lead. Many of the earliest TAPP partnerships focused on writing-translation projects, and a common bilateral TAPP partnership features a collaboration between students in a U.S.-based technical writing course and a translation course in Europe (Vandepitte, Maylath, Mousten, Isohella, & Minacori, 2016). However, as the TAPP network has expanded, instructors and students have engaged in new kinds of collaborations. This paper highlights one such collaboration between a writing in the health professions course in the United States and a specialized translation course in healthcare in Spain. Our paper describes a bilateral writing-translation TAPP collaboration that engages students in healthcare writing and translation. We focus on three key areas of our collaboration: ● Description of courses and student profiles. ● Description of the project and tasks developed. ● Evidence of student learning through an analysis of Pre-Learning reports, Post-Learning reports, and translations authored by students. Through this paper, we hope to provide an example of how a bilateral healthcare writing and translation works to TAPP members and those interested in virtual exchanges. In addition, we hope to contribute to the body of research that chronicles twenty years of TAPP collaborations.

Globalisation and mobility have created new cultural, social and working scenarios which demand wider academic and professional skills. Taking advantage of the synergy of technology and pedagogy, Virtual Exchanges (VEs) provide learners with an adequate context for real-world intercultural learning. In VEs mediated by videoconference, students interact synchronously, close to face-to-face experiences, boosting communicative, interpersonal and intercultural skills development. However, foreign language and intercultural communication can also turn into negative forces for some learners and become a source of discomfort. In this regard, Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA), has been one of the most studied and damaging emotions in multilingual and multicultural contexts. This dysphoric anxiety is suffered by at least two-thirds of foreign language learners and users (Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope, 1986; Trang, Baldauf and Moni, 2013). However, there was no available tool to detect the sources and explore the effects of FLA in VE interactions. As a result, the Telecollaborative Foreign Language Anxiety scale, the T-FLAS - A 21-item questionnaire - was developed and validated, showing a high internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha of 0.96). In this article, the foundation, development and validation of the T-FLAS is explained, as well as the results obtained with the tool in three subsequent VE projects. The aim is to share with researchers and practitioners the first insights on FLA in VE settings using the scale.

Translators and technical communicators increasingly perform their work as part of global virtual teams (GVTs). To prepare students for developing critical understanding for such work, instructors can assign readings, asking students to reflect on the importance of building trust (Crisp & Jarvenpaa, 2013), cultural intelligence (Li, Rau, Li, & Maedche, 2017), and strategies for managing multicultural teams (Behfar, Kern, & Brett, 2006). More important for developing critical understanding, however, is the experience of managing a “real” Global Virtual Team (GVT). Research questions for this work include the following: How does attention to and work with international translators influence critical understanding for managing GVTs? and How does situatedness influence critical understanding of the many requirements and factors in a translation project? This article provides a brief theoretical background to the project and then details our redesign of the standard collaborative formats of the Trans-Atlantic & Pacific Project (TAPP) and associated assignments to focus on student development of critical understanding for managing GVTs. We include identification of themes from a subset of literature relevant to student practice in managing a translation team; description of the TAPP redesign in which University of Minnesota (UMN) students serve as project managers of teams of University of Trieste (UT) students practicing translation; and a brief summary of results from deployments of this model during 2019 and 2020. We conclude with emphasis on the need to redesign the TAPP format to meet evolving learning needs of students.

The focus of the paper is the identification of cultural and linguistic aspects that affect the dynamics of online cross-cultural and cross-linguistic professional communication. The researched groups are TAPP-linked undergraduate students of writing courses at the University of Minnesota in USA and intermediate/advanced MA English language university students in Poland (State University of Applied Sciences in Konin). The thesis defended is that the development of students’ technological awareness and professional skills is positively afforded by online collaborative contacts with peers of other languages and cultures.