Multilingual language learning
Target audience – Secondary school language teacher
Age Group – 14-16
Short overview of scenario
The Basque Autonomous Community is an increasingly multilingual region on the border between France and Spain. It has a population of close to three million inhabitants. Spanish and Basque are both co-official languages and, in addition, over 100 minority languages spoken by foreign communities have been identified in the region. All students learn Basque, Spanish and at least a foreign language at school, usually English. Therefore, our context is shaped not only for being multilingual, but also for involving a regional minority (Basque) language at all levels of education.
Due to the complex sociolinguistic context of the region and the objectives to raise multilingual citizens Basque educational authorities have made an attempt to go from a monolingual to a multilingual pedagogical approach. The educational department has trained schools and language teachers on adopting an integrated language curriculum and even on using didactic strategies that encourage students to use their entire linguistic repertoire when learning languages.
Curriculum Constructs
DigiCompEdu
05. STUDENTS EMPOWERMENT:
- Accessibility and inclusion:
- To ensure accessibility of all students, including those who have special (linguistic) needs, to the resources and learning activities.
- Personalization:
- To use digital technologies to attend to the various learning needs of the students, allowing them to advance to different levels and speeds and follow routes and learning objectives individually.
- Active student engagement with their own learning:
- To use digital technologies to promote active and creative engagement of students with a subject.
- To integrate digital technologies into pedagogical strategies to develop transversal competencies and promote complex thinking and creative expression.
- To open learning to new areas, to real-world contexts, involving the students themselves in activities and practices, in scientific research or in solving complex problems or by any other means.
0.6. DEVELOPMENT OF THE DIGITAL COMPETENCE OF STUDENTS:
- Information and media literacy:
- To incorporate learning activities, assignments and assessments that require students to express their needs of information.
- To locate information and resources in digital environments; organize, process, analyze and interpret information and compare and critically evaluate the credibility and reliability of the information and its sources.
- Communication and digital collaboration:
- To incorporate learning activities, assignments and assessments that require students to effectively use and responsible digital technologies for communication, collaboration and civic participation.
Bloom’s Taxonomy
Comprehend – Demonstrate an understanding of facts and ideas by organizing, summarizing, translating, generalizing and stating the main ideas.
Apply – Using acquired knowledge to solve problems in new situations.
Analyze – Examine and break information into component parts, determining how the parts relate to one another, identifying motives or causes, making inferences, and finding evidence to support generalizations.
Evaluate – Presenting and defending opinions by making judgments about information, the validity of the ideas or the quality of the work based on a set of criteria.
AI@School Curriculum Area
New Pedagogical Opportunities – How AI can improve the learning experience
Scenario Objectives
The aim of this didactic material is for students to use a tool based on artificial intelligence. That is to say, to verify through its use the benefits that artificial intelligence brings in their daily life and especially in their tasks as a student and that, consequently, they can understand that artificial intelligence is something close that can improve their daily life. Likewise, it is also intended that students know basic tools to be able to work in multilingual academic contexts and how to use them in the most effective and efficient way.
Outline plan
| Activity 1 | Artificial intelligence and machine language translation |
| Timing | 1 session of 2 hours |
| Methods | Students will be asked to choose a text of interest to them in English and translate it into Basque (the main language of study) with different tools that use artificial intelligence and finally choose the best translation. Specifically, they will have to do the following:1.- Choose a text of their interest of at most one page.2.-Briefly discuss neural machine translation and ask whether they know or have used any neuronal translators.Translate the text with at least three different translators:Google translator: https://translate.google.com/Neuronal Translator:https://www.euskadi.eus/itzuli/Deepl:https://www.deepl.com/en/translator4.- Choose the best translation after playing around with different options: translating directly Basque-English or Basque-Spanish, Spanish-English (discuss why the results may be different/better-the aspect of data in machine learning can be discussed), translating the whole text or paragraph.5. Discuss what the translators seem to have more trouble with (e.g., informal language).6. Discuss how these translators could help their everyday life (access information in different languages, make their work accessible to speakers of other languages). |
| What the tutor is doing | The tutor will have to supervise the work and guide their work and discussions related to the different challenges:-Analyse whether it is better to translate directly from English into Basque or whether it is better to translate directly from English into Spanish and from Spanish into Basque.-Whether it is better to put the whole text into the translator or to go paragraph by paragraph.-Students should reflect on the different strategies. |
| What the learners are doing | Translating a text of their interest using different tools and strategies in order to get the best translation of the text.This work could be done individually or in small groups depending on the interest of students and teachers. |
| Equipment and Support | Personal (or group) computers and Internet access |
| Link to AI@School Curriculum | https://aiatschool.eu/?e-landing-page=ai-toolkit |
| Assessment of/for learning | Evaluate:-That the students have used different tools and approaches to translating their selected text.-That the students have used different strategies and discussed the different approaches.-That the learner has achieved a quality translation. |
| Resources/links/relevant content/Examples | Tools:https://www.deepl.com/translatorhttps://www.euskadi.eus/itzuli/https://translate.google.es/?hl=eu Articles of interest: https://oxfordhousebcn.com/en/artificial-intelligence-translators-the-future-of-language-learning/https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336486640_Translation_and_Artificial_Intelligence_Where_are_we_headinghttps://www.fenews.co.uk/fe-voices/how-is-artificial-intelligence-challenging-the-translation-industry/https://tecvolucion.com/traducciones-automaticas-mejores-avances-inteligencia-artificial/https://www.lavanguardia.com/tecnologia/20210212/6235165/barrera-ia.html |
| Activity 2 | Artificial intelligence and machine language translation for the learning of a minority language: writing an argumentative essay (AE) |
| Timing | 2 sessions of 2 hours |
| Methods | The tutor will explain the structure and conventions used when writing an argumentative essay in Basque. Students will be asked to collect complex information in their home languages, or in the languages they feel more confident in. Then, they will translate it into Basque and adapt it to the necessities and conventions of their AE. |
| What the tutor is doing | The tutor will have to supervise the work and set them different challenges and options:-To analyse whether it is better to translate directly from their home languages into Basque or whether it is better to translate them first to English/Spanish and from there into Basque.-Whether it is better to put the whole text into the translator or to go by information chunks. – To see whether during the translation process the conventions change. |
| What the learners are doing | -Students should evaluate the correctness of the translations. -Students should correct any mistake conducted by the translator. -Students should also reflect on the different strategies they are taking in the process and compare them to those taken by their peers with different home languages. |
| Equipment and Support | Personal (or group) computers and Internet access |
| Link to AI@School Curriculum | https://aiatschool.eu/?e-landing-page=ai-toolkit |
| Assessment of/for learning | It will be evaluated:-That the students have understood and applied the theory behind the writing of an AE- That the students have reflected upon the translation process and the strategies they used. -That the learner has achieved a quality text. |
| Resources/links/relevant content/Examples | Toolshttps://www.euskadi.eus/itzuli/https://translate.google.es/?hl=euhttps://www.deepl.com/translator Dictionarieshttps://hiztegiak.elhuyar.eus/http://www.hiztegia.net/orokorra.php Contenthttps://euskaralanduz.weebly.com/iritziargudio-testua.html |
| Activity 3 | Co-evaluation and reflection about the translation process and the tools |
| Timing | 1 session 1 hour |
| Methods | Students will be asked to revise the AE of a classmate written in the previous lesson by using a translator. Then, they will discuss the use of translators and the quality of the output produced by the tools used to translate the AEs. |
| What the tutor is doing | The tutor will have to supervise the co-evaluation activity.The tutor will have to lead the discussion and propose questions for reflection: -To analyze which tools are more accurate when translating from one language to the other. – To discuss strategies to improve the output of the translation- To discuss advantages and disadvantages of the tools- To discuss whether it is necessary the review of a human personThe discussion could be done in small groups and then share the main ideas with the whole group. |
| What the learners are doing | -Students should evaluate the correctness of the AE produced by a classmate using a translator. -Students should correct any mistake conducted by the translator. -Students should reflect on the different strategies they are taking in the process and compare them to those taken by their peers with different home languages. – Students should reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of using these tools Students should also reflect on the accuracy of each tool when translating from one language to the other. |
| Equipment and Support | Personal (or group) computers and Internet access |
| Link to AI@School Curriculum | https://aiatschool.eu/?e-landing-page=ai-toolkit |
| Assessment of/for learning | It will be evaluated:- That the students have identified any mistake conducted by the translator – That the students have reflected upon the translation process and the strategies they used. -That the students have reflected on the use of different tools and techniques |
| Resources/links/relevant content/Examples | Toolshttps://www.euskadi.eus/itzuli/https://translate.google.es/?hl=euhttps://www.deepl.com/translator Dictionarieshttps://hiztegiak.elhuyar.eus/http://www.hiztegia.net/orokorra.php |
Our notes from practice
This didactic unit was designed to be completed using the translators available online. Nevertheless, it could be adapted to be completed offline using paper dictionaries.
The concept could easily be applied to other languages and minority languages eg Welsh, Breton.
Toolkit
Title: Itzultzaile Neurologikoa
URL: https://www.euskadi.eus/itzuli/
Short Description: The online translator of the Basque Government. It translates in the following directions:
Basque-Spanish; Spanish-Basque; French-Basque; Basque-French; English-Basque; Basque-English.
Title: Google Translate
URL: https://www.bbva.com/es/avances-traductor-google-nos-dicen-futuro-inteligencia-artificial/
Short Description: Google’s Translator. This is a form of neural machine translation that can automatically translate one piece of text into over 100 languages. At the time of writing, Google Translate is capable of using 109 different languages.
Title: DeepL
URL: https://www.deepl.com/translator
Short Description: DeepL. DeepL Translator is a neural machine translation service launched in August 2017 and owned by DeepL SE, based in Cologne, Germany. The translation system was first developed within Linguee and launched as a DeepL entity.
Image 1. Screenshot of a Basque translator (Elhuyar)
