Book chapter
English

Digital DLC Models as Instruments for Raising Awareness and Better Understanding of Current Multilingualism in HEI

Published inLarissa Aronin & Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer (Ed.), Language Awareness and Identity, p. 45-65
PublisherSpringer
Collection
  • Multilingual Education; 45
Publication date2023-07-30
First online date2023-07-30
Abstract

With globalisation, the stakeholders of the higher education sector are getting increasingly mobile, which results in the linguistic diversity in the institutions. This situation imposes on university administrations and authorities the need to accommodate student and teacher populations with diverse and heterogeneous language skills. The issue of multilingualism in education concerns not only learning and acquisition of additional languages but entails the challenges of use of several languages in educational institutions both for daily communication and for learning/teaching various disciplines. The latter option is currently very underdeveloped, probably due to scarcity of digital instruments that would enable analyses of this diversity in the university population. Most of today’s multilingual digital technologies erroneously assume that their users are only able to use one of the many languages they practice at any given time. ICT systems can build on the DLC concept to represent the multilingual skills of teachers and learners in a digitally compact and manageable way. The concept of Dominant Language Constellation (DLC) includes only the most expedient languages for a person and allows them to be seen as one unit consisting of languages working together, not as separate languages. The DLC is sufficiently concise and structured to build a digital representation of it. It would make it possible, for example, to adapt language learning and practice to the language skills of each student, but also to adapt educational services for all students and improve the reception of foreign students in an institution. To this end, the first part of the chapter will be devoted to analyze the situation in the higher education sector, with the example of Switzerland, as well as in the educational technologies used there, and to identify and delimit the needs. The second part of the chapter will present the design of digital models of individual and group DLC and their visualisation in 3D. To make it concrete, we will describe the realisation of a prototype of a DLC profile server, and we will show what it is possible to understand and deduce thanks to the digital models. We will outline how university authorities, administration, teachers and students can benefit from understanding their own and each other’s language clusters as units that complement and interact with each other.

Keywords
  • 3D visualization
  • Multilingualism in HEI
  • Educational technologies (EdTech)
  • DLC
  • Modelling
  • Identity of multilinguals
Citation (ISO format)
MOCCOZET, Laurent, BÖCKH, Maya. Digital DLC Models as Instruments for Raising Awareness and Better Understanding of Current Multilingualism in HEI. In: Language Awareness and Identity. Larissa Aronin & Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer (Ed.). [s.l.] : Springer, 2023. p. 45–65. (Multilingual Education) doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-37027-4_3
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Book chapter (Published version)
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Creation24/08/2023 15:55:47
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