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Competence Oriented Multilingual Adaptive Language Assessment and Training System
Date du début: 1 sept. 2014, Date de fin: 31 août 2017 PROJET  TERMINÉ 

The European Union (EU) has put a high emphasis, in Horizon 2020, on youth, education and employment. According to Eurostat, the employment rate has been steadily dropped to 68.5% in 2013 from its boom peak of 70.3% in 2008. This affects mostly young, low-skilled workers and non-EU citizens especially in south and east of EU. Over 76 million people in Europe have low or no qualification. In 2020 perspective, the employment rate in EU should reach up to 75% on an average, with particular attention to those affected groups. The education, as well as the mobility in EU, are the main tools to overcome unemployability in EU. According to the European Commision (EC) [IZA Research Report No.19 and IZA VT/2006/042 Apr.2008], the language barrier, as well as unsuccessful cultural adaption, are known to be the main obstacles for mobility across the Europe and for finding jobs. It is also shown that the cultural adaptation is the result of inadequate language competence [IZA]. “Languages are more and more important to increase levels of employability and mobility of young people, and poor language skills are a major obstacle to free movement of workers” [EC: Rethinking Education COM(2012) 669 final]. In this regard EC persuades the member states to take the following actions (a) increase transversal skills such as language and digital skills (key-action 3) and (b) scale up the use of ICT-supported learning and access to high quality open educational resources (key-action 5) [EC: Rethinking Education]. Moreover, internationalization and global competition requires that people are more competent with respect to the language. Therefore, internationalization should be an everyday feature in Vocational Education and Training (VET) and in this regard qualification of foreign languages is essential in order to find and keep a job as well as manage everyday life [Bruges Communique 2011-2020]. To address the problem of inadequate language competence in Europe, we propose the Competence Oriented Multilingual Adaptive Language Assessment and Training System (COMALAT). COMALAT is a user friendly and adaptable language assessment and training platform which is intended to support multilingual and multimodal training materials. The platform is designed to support the personalization i.e. each person has to be specifically treated, accompanied and supported by the system since every individual’s language proficiency, goal of learning, limitations as well as needs are different. The idea of a competence oriented and adaptable language training system is a need in the domain of language training and VET. In addition to many online language training portals, we investigated the EU granted projects that could be regarded as close or related. Using the ADAM database (www.adam-europe.eu), we identified and investigated 45 projects in the direction of language and vocational educational training. The closely related projects/portals have the lack of customization and fine adaptation of training materials to the needs, goals, limitations and competences of end users. They do not consider the constraints of the user and the proposed training material just takes into account the current language proficiency of the users. The users who are evaluated at the same level of language proficiencies are then provided with almost the same training materials and they are expected to complete the current training level in order to progress to the next learning step. The current training platforms therefore are not adaptable based on the goals, needs, limitations and individual language learning competence of each user. Additionally, we also found out that they are not appropriately available as open educational resources (OER). According to UNESCO - Guideline for OER in Higher Education, “OER are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain and have been released under an open licence that permits access, use, repurposing, reuse and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions”. To sum up, the current challenges and shortcomings which consortium members deal with are: (a) insufficient language skills of young people, adults and low-skilled workers which hurdles their mobility and employability in the EU, (b) lack of effective adaptable multi-lingual language training systems, which considers the competence, goals and constraints of users, (c) diversity of languages in EU, each requiring a special treatment in training systems, (d) the inability of current language training systems, to be tailored and customized towards individual needs and to provide intelligent and dynamic adjustment of training plans based on the user behavior, and (e) the closely related projects/tools suffer from being appropriately available as OER and providing proper IT tool.

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