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 ofemployment 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.