General Recommendations 

Specific Recom.s
Policy Document

• We recommend that European institutions of higher education explicitly recognise the importance of the application of information and communication technologies to the teaching and learning of non-European languages. 
• We recommend that work towards open public standards for encoding all languages of the world is stimulated. 
• We recommend that an international infrastructure should be put into place for creating, maintaining and distributing scholarly resources for the study of NEL, including text corpora, lexical databases, term banks, computational grammars, etc. 

Specific Recommendations  

General Recom.s
Policy Document
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• We recommend more intensive exchange of scholarly resources and techniques between industry and academia. 
• We recommend that industry and academia stimulate the exchange of scholars and industrial researchers. 
• We recommend that traineeship (internship) should be part of NEL students' curricula. 
• We recommend that academia take industrial needs of recruitment into account (with consequences for curricula, job profiles and life-long learning). 
• We recommend the definition of agreed standards of co-operation with industry. 
• We recommend that the need of students for inexpensive learning environments, including hardware (e.g. multilingual keyboards) and software, be acknowledged.
• We recommend international funding schemes for creating NEL teaching and learning materials, such as handbooks, CD-ROMs, Web materials, ODL broadcast, multifunctional model and practice corpora, etc. 
• We recommend the creation of an international forum dedicated to NEL computing, where teachers and students can meet and exchange information, experiences, etc.
• We recommend systematic teacher training through affordable, publicly funded workshops, tutorials, summer schools, etc., with the participation of the industries of the field. 
• We recommend awareness actions to make students and prospective students aware of the offers in NEL (in particular new job profiles) including computer applications in NEL. 
• We recommend, as a matter of general policy, the broadening of European NEL actions to include other countries and to cease being overly euro-centric.
• We recommend that co-operation should be sought with East European countries, which despite their expertise in NEL are too frequently excluded from the electronic arena.
• We recommend the inclusion of non-European countries, in particular those whose languages are the object of study, in all actions.

Policy Document

General Recom.s
Specific Recom.s
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• The non-European languages have a right to have at least the same level of proper computer support as the main European languages, so that applications for those languages may be developed parallel with European languages. 
• Public standards for encoding all languages of the world is essential, because this would enable the transfer and sharing of scarce academic textual resources in those languages. 
• Language resources should function as a free international library, in co-operation with free national libraries, which together would form an international infrastructure. This very same infrastructure would also permit fruitful debates on problems of quality assurance, adherence to standards, authenticity, copyrights, etc. 
• The creation of NEL teaching and learning materials should be done in close co-operation between the EU and non-European countries, ensuring that all prospective users of the products are considered. 
• The awareness actions directed to students could be carried out through Web dissemination, associations, contacts with the media, local student advisers, etc. The target groups to be informed are both secondary school and university students.
• Co-operation with non-European countries should not take the colonial form of sending them finished products. Instead, they ought to be involved from the start in long term co-operative projects which allow them to choose their own destiny.

Closely linked to the work of the NEL-group is the EU-sponsored initiative of establishing CAMEEL, a Master’s Degree of Computational Applications on Extra-European Modern Languages. CAMEEL home page will be available later.

Based on the work done by the NEL-group (Non-European Languages)  of ACO*HUM during the years 1998-2000.
Responsible author: Arvi Hurskainen 19.10.2000

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