General Recommendations
- Larger coordinated efforts are needed to attract larger student numbers.
[CL-3]
- Larger coordinated efforts are needed to bundle scarce teaching
competencies. [CL-4]
- Larger coordinated efforts are needed to develop innovative pedagogical
resources. [CL-5]
- Larger coordinated efforts are needed to promote mobility through
international recognition of credits and commonly agreed degree
requirements. [CL-6]
- Old barriers between the humanities and science/engineering must be
lowered. [CL-8]
- Links between education and research need to be strengthened. [CL-11]
- Lifelong learning needs to take place. [CL-12]
- The summer schools and courses organized by ELSNET, FOLLI and others need
to continue. [CL-13]
- The involvement of learned societies like the EACL in educational matters
through international special interest groups should be fostered. [CL-14]
- 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. These
languages have a right to have at least the same level of proper computer
support as the main European languages. [NEL01]
- We recommend that work towards open public standards for encoding all
languages of the world is stimulated with a view to enabling the transfer
and sharing of scarce academic textual resources in those languages. [NEL02]
- We recommend the definition of agreed standards of cooperation with
industry. [NEL08]
- We recommend systematic teacher training through affordable, publicly
funded workshops, tutorials, summer schools, etc., with the participation of
the industries of the field. [NEL12]
- We recommend the inclusion of non-European countries, in particular those
whose languages are the object of study, in all actions. Cooperation 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 cooperative projects which allow them to choose their own destiny.
[NEL16]
- Larger coordinated efforts are needed to promote mobility through
multilateral international recognition of credits and commonly agreed degree
requirements. [PHON-3]
- Larger coordinated efforts are needed to develop innovative pedagogical
resources. [PHON-4]
- Lifelong learning needs to take place. [PHON-5]
- Old barriers between the humanities and science/engineering must be
lowered. [PHON-6]
- The summer schools and courses organized by ELSNET, and others need to
continue. [PHON-7]
- Continuous interdisciplinary professional development for teaching staff
in speech technology in the context of life long learning and modern
teaching methodologies. [SLE-06]
- For universities in Central and Eastern Europe it is imperative to
strength the links with similar institutions from EU in order to set up new
curricula, to retrain the staff and to develop the educational and research
infrastructure according to well recognized standards. [SLE-08]
- Building professional competencies through training mobilities in the EU
frame by different programmes and according to a common accreditation system
(ECTS). [SLE-10]
- To continue the organisation of summer schools in the idea of the
integration of speech and language. [SLE-12]
Specific Recommendations
- It is recommended that work towards the further development of Speech and
Language Therapy as a recognised academic discipline should continue. It is
important to recognise its multidisciplinary links and to encourage
theoretical developments and research in both the art of clinical practice
and the science of intervention. [CD1]
- It is recommended that courses in phonetics should be an essential element
in SLT education, and that they should incorporate a direct clinical focus.
A thorough understanding of speech production is seen as a prerequisite for
good practice in SLT. [CD2]
- An expansion of the role of methods and tools of SLE in education and in
clinical practice is recommended, even if SLT educators are unfamiliar with
SLE and somewhat sceptical about the its importance. Development of deeper
knowledge of SLE, and collaboration between SLE and SLT should be considered
at Master's degree level. [CD3]
- Collaboration between those working in CAL and in SLT for production of
materials is strongly recommened. The use of CAL offers exciting
possibilities and is viewed positively overall, but its exploitation in SLT
education needs care and selectivity. [CD4]
- It is recommended that the use of the internet for education in various
areas of SLT should be facilitated for the benefit of clinicians, students
and teachers. The need for observance of professional ethics must be
emphasised. [CD5]
- It is recommended that teaching and learning strategies that facilitate
the application of theory to therapy should be developed and exploited, and
that the development of the professional skills that lead to the generation
of reflective practitioners should be facilitated. Incorporating
pre-clinical subjects (anatomy, physiology, linguistics, phonetics etc) in
the new pedagogical methods used in SLT education would have major
advantages for student therapists. [CD6]
- It is recommended that closer collaboration between SLT educators,
pre-clinical and clinical educators should be encouraged in order to provide
good cases or problems for students' learning. [CD7]
- It is recommended that academic and clinical teachers in SLT should have
access to continuous training oppor-tunities aimed at helping them to meet
the challenges posed by the introduction of new pedagogical methods. [CD8]
- It is recommended that the use of Internet as a part of study programmes
in SLT is implemented initially on an experimental level, with its
effectiveness to be fully evaluated over time. [CD9]
- It is recommended that exploitation of the Internet/WWW should be used to
facilitate the application of theory to practice, and to help bridge the gap
between research and clinical teaching in SLT. [CD10]
- It is recommended that a standard approach to the use of IPA phonetic
conventions for transcribing normal and disordered speech should be adopted
across Europe and that this should be a core component of educational
courses. Further consideration might be given to the definition of minimum
standards in phonetics which could be recognised across Europe for all
students of S<. [CD11]
- It is recommended that further work should be done at a European level to
evaluate educational and professional standards in SLT and to facilitate
good practice in education. This may be done through activities such as
development and sharing of curricular resources or the development of an
advisory network including representative professional bodies and
educationalists in SLT. [CD12]
- CPLOL advocates a variety of clinical placements in the basic education of
SLTs. In line with Socrates objectives, we would advocate student and staff
exchanges between a variety of academic institutions, facilitating the
development of equality of standards in SLT across Europe. [CD13]
- There is a need for new researchers in CL. [CL-1]
- The capacity for CL education needs to be increased. [CL-2]
- CL must not forget that theory is also important, and the balance between
theory and practice needs always to be there. [CL-7]
- CL and speech processing need to cooperate in building links to industry.
[CL-10]
- The CL community may be interested in establishing international degrees
in CL in its own right. If this happens, then certification and
accreditation will be important, as it has been for the Master's in Language
and Speech in which ESCA and EACL are involved. [CL-15]
- Internationally funded RTD programmes should continue to support projects
for the development of advanced teaching tools for CL. [CL-16]
- Future research projects in CL should be explicitly required to make their
results available for educational reuse. [CL-17]
- Institutions for higher education should consider open and distance
learning schemes and life-long learning in CL. [CL-20]
- An increase of highly competent teaching staff at institutions offering CL
is needed. [CL-21]
- We recommend that reforms in CL education not be limited to the level of
higher education. It is necessary to initiate wide preparatory measures at
other levels of education. Awareness raising and competence raising measures
in secondary education can for instance take the form of job orientation
with respect to the language industries and the integration of NLP tools in
grammar teaching and foreign language teaching. [CL-22]
- 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. This should function as a free international library, by the
cooperation of free national libraries into a new international
infrastructure. This very same infrastructure would also permit fruitful
debates on problems of quality assurance, adherence to standards,
authenticity, copyrights, etc. [NEL03]
- 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., in close
cooperation between the EU and non-European countries, ensuring that all
prospective users of the products are considered. [NEL10]
- We recommend the creation of an international forum dedicated to NEL
computing, where teachers and students can meet and exchange information,
experiences, etc. [NEL11]
- We recommend, as a matter of general policy, the broadening of European
NEL actions to include other countries and to cease being overly
eurocentric. [NEL14]
- We recommend that cooperation should be sought with East European
countries, which despite their expertise in NEL are too frequently excluded
from the electronic arena. [NEL15]
- There is a need for new researchers in PHON for basic research in speech
sciences and for applications in the field of speech technology and speech
therapy. [PHON-1]
- The capacity for education in Phonetics and in the total field of Speech
Communication Sciences needs to be increased. [PHON-2]
- The introduction and the extension of updated curriculum on SLE education
in universities to develop strategic needs accross multilingual Europe.
[SLE-01]
- To improve and to strength the links between industry (research and
development laboratories) and universities in the area of SLE. [SLE-02]
- The definition of a coherent system for acquisition of competencies and
skills through dedicated training models addressed to various job profiles
and to expected changes in the SLE market. [SLE-03]
- The creation of an European infrastructure for testing, evaluation,
certification, quality assessment and dissemination of training resources in
the area of SLE in order to increase the quality of collaboration among
different institutions over Europe. [SLE-04]
- The definition of a system for the accreditation of SLE courses and a
validation procedure for that. [SLE-05]
- Larger coordinated efforts are needed to continue the promotion of
research and innovations in SLE for developing new applications using the
integration of speech and language. [SLE-09]
- Industry, national and international bodies should continue to support
projects for the development, testing and evaluation of advanced training
modules for SLE, including ODL and LLL. ISCA-SIG on education can play an
important role. [SLE-11]
- More phonetics and computational linguistics in technical university
education could better prepare students for the professional jobs in SLE.
[SLE-13]
- The contents of curricula in SLE should be in consensus with the
multidisciplinarity of this field. It is stratified into different
approaching levels. A selection of tutorials modules are recommended
together with software resources available in relation to curricular
requirements and educational criteria. [SLE-14]
Responsible author: Bojan Petek, 18th October 2000
Recommendations to EU
Based on the work done by the Socrates TNP on Language and Speech during the
years 1997-2000, the JEWELS project has made a number of recommendations. These
are classified under the headings of:
Bojan Petek, 18th October 2000.