SEAH Project

On 23 October 2020 SEAH, the co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme (Action KA203) project, written and managed by the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures with 5 European partners, kicked off.

The name SEAH stands for Sharing European Architectural Heritage: innovative language teaching tools for academic and professional mobility in Architecture and Construction. The main objective of the project is to create online language courses (in Italian, Russian, Spanish, French and German) addressed to Erasmus students of architecture.

UdA is the project leader, with scientific head Prof. Mariapia D'Angelo of the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, assisted by colleagues Prof. Maria Chiara Ferro and Prof. Sara Piccioni.

On January 13th, 2021 SEAH participants met online for their second meeting. The meeting was attended by partners of the four European universities involved in the project (Bordeaux Montaigne University, Masaryk University, Polotsk State University, Polytechnic University of Madrid, as well as by the UdA team as project coordinator. During the meeting, the consortium discussed how to build large language databases to create online language courses (in Italian, Russian, Spanish, French and German) for Erasmus architecture students. Thanks to those steps, partners will be able to develop learning materials, allowing new generations of students to embark on their Erasmus adventure without fear of language barriers!

On 15th February, 2021 SEAH consortium took part in the first triannual monitoring meeting, after the kick-off meeting held in October 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the meeting has been realised in online mode on the basis of an agenda developed and shared jointly by all partners. The agenda was scheduled also in line with a questionnaire circulated and filled in by each organization before the online conference. UdA team, as coordinator, welcomed participants and facilitated all the session. The first part of the meeting has been devoted to administrative and communication issues. In particular, they focused on the importance of an incisive and efficient dissemination strategy in order to unify partners’ efforts and boost project visibility. Internet Web Solutions, the IT partner from Spain, presented the state of art of the Open Educational Resources platform that is already online here.

The second part of the meeting has been devoted to Intellectual Output 1 and each Institution was required to briefly present and share proposals for corpus compilation. Significant steps forward have been taken for the development of language corpora (big databanks) to be loaded on the platform in order to reflect how language is actually used by academics and professionals in the field of Architecture and Construction (AC). 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 with a view to encourage student mobility and to improve the outcomes of mobility programs.

On the 1st of July 2021, the SEAH project held a meeting on the Microsoft Teams platform due to restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The meeting was related to the upcoming deadlines of IO1, the advancement of the OER platform (IO2) and first ideas about IO3. All the files and documents presented at the meeting can be found on the SEAH Google Drive.
The complete recording of the meeting can be found at Microsoft Teams platform

З7 days before the meeting, the UdA Team acquired the responses to the 2nd Self-Evaluation Questionnaire. The overall opinions about the key activities for IO1, project communication, management and coordination, were mostly good.
The results of the questionnaire 

Reporting Deadlines (Glauco Conte, UdA)
Glauco Conte of UdA Team gives notice of the upcoming deadlines and of the report of the first period about IO1 within Seah Project.
Slides  

OUTPUT 2: OER Platform & Project Website (Roberta Albertazzi, IWS)
Recap of IO2 and an overview of next steps. The public website is now available with different sections. In terms of indexed pages, we have more than one thousand indexed pages. In terms of positioning, we are on page 1 for the open search: Sharing European Architectural Heritage. In terms of statistics, we have more than 12000 visits since the website opening.

Roberta gives notice of the online dissemination strategies and actions like press releases on partners’ institutional channels, Youtube channel or Facebook page. She also shows to all participants the functionalities implemented in the SEAH website, such as Documents Section or Community Section. She also shows an easy and intuitive interface for learning contents, which can be useful for future learning activities (multiple choice tests, fill in the blanks). She also sets the next stages within IO2 and IO3.

IO1: Progress Report (Sara Piccioni, UdA)
Sara’s speech provided a progress report of IO1 technical platform and texts collections. She also provides a new deadline (7th of September) for text collection and gives advices about the transcription methods. There was place for describing some dissemination actions undertaken by all partners.

Anna Kupsc (BMU) gently shared with all the partners some important resource for text transcriptions:

• https://downsub.com/lang/fr
• https://clarin.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/BASWebServices/interface/ASR

Getting ready for IO3 (Mariapia D’Angelo, UdA)
Mariapia provides some proposals on training contents and suggestions about the structure of IO3 language learning modules. She shows the example of OLS (Online Linguistic Support), which contains grammar exercises and professional vocabulary, and of the Incorporating Corpora Project. For the possible consultation of this platform, she kindly shared her credentials: OLS usr: psw: Mariapia1. It was also suggested that the texts composing the corpora should, at least partially, cover the topics programmed to be used in the teaching material of IO3. Finally, Mariapia gives advice about the Vocabulary Modules in the teaching materials.

On April 21-23, 2022, an event was held under the SEAH project - the Republican Scientific and Practical Seminar "SEAH: Innovative Tools for Teaching Languages for Academic and Professional Mobility in the direction of "Architecture and Construction".

Previously, the presentation of the results of the project was planned as part of a conference at the Faculty of Civil Engineering in September 2022. But due to the fact that fellow architects cannot give an exact answer whether the conference will take place, it was decided to hold the event in April. Such a decision seems expedient, because. Linguistic corpora in different languages have already been formed and are functioning, training modules have been uploaded to the project website, and using the example of even one module, one can consider methodological tools and principles of work, building training sessions based on the linguistic corpus. In addition, September is the beginning of the academic year, a difficult time for teachers and students, so it would be difficult to gather a large number of participants in September.

The seminar was organized in order to share the results of the work done, to make them available for use by linguists from other universities and educational institutions. The event brought together scientists from different universities - Vitebsk State University. P.M. Masherova, Belarusian State University, Minsk State Linguistic University, Grodno State University. Yanka Kupala, Gomel State University. Francysk Skorina, Baranovichi State University, MITSO, as well as the Higher School of Economics (Moscow), Baranovichi State University. Students studying in the specialty "Russian as a foreign language" and "Architecture" also became participants of the seminar.

On April 21, the work was held within the framework of the round table "Possibilities of corpus linguistics in language teaching: methodological tools". Svetlana Lyasovich and Natalya Nester spoke about the process of creating the Russian language corpus of professional orientation "Architecture and construction". And in continuation, colleagues from other universities shared their experience of research in the field of corpus linguistics and methodological tools for working with text corpora.

Colleagues stated that the linguistic corpus created in the SEAH project today has no analogues in Belarus and is a good start for the development of professional corpus linguistics. The second day of the seminar on April 22 was full of interactive activities. All participants were divided into teams, each of which, using the architectural terminology created by the SEAH building, created a new non-existent object of architectural heritage.

The teams were able to get to know the architecture of Polotsk better and update the methodological tools that were discussed the previous day during the architectural quest around Polotsk.