Project-Based Learning in the Languages for Specific Purposes Classroom

Abstract

Specialized communication skills, in combination with a multilingual professional competence, are crucial to address the demands of our today's complex reality. Over the last decades, institutions of higher education have more and more incorporated project-based learning (PBL) into their curricula, in a response to prepare students to new professional challenges and a wide range of employment opportunities. This paper presents a Project-based learning (PBL) approach by introducing Master's students of “Languages and Business Relations” at the University of Aveiro to two Translation Management Systems (TMS), i.e. memoQ and Memsource. Both TMSs allow students to explore a wide range of practical learning experiences, as they enable the creation of multilingual databases through term extraction, sentence alignment of bilingual corpora, the preparation of a project quote, among many other functionalities.