Project Overview:
Leveraging Unistrasi’s International Horizon: Utilising the 14 foreign languages taught on campus and used on the website to communicate with students.
Contribution to Corpus Analysis: Analysing ULCs’ websites in Italy, Spain, UK and Ireland, with a specific focus on the Spanish websites and their English versions.
Specific Aspects of Investigation:
Global Events Impact:
Focus: Investigating how EULCs' attention to multiculturalism and multilingualism helps reduce social and communicative distance during global crises like pandemics and economic downturns.
Social Media Interaction:
Extension: Analysing how university interactions with their audience are transformed through inter/transmediality, intersemiotic, and audiovisual translation on social media.
Perceptual Investigation:
Eye-Tracking Technology: The eye tracker is used to observe users‘ eye movements as they navigate the sites and to highlight any communication issues in order to structure hypertextuality according to users’ needs.
Mapping Results: Correlating eye-tracking data with topics from textual analysis and findings from questionnaires and empirical investigations.
Methodology:
Textual and Visual Analysis: Examining both textual and visual elements of the websites.
Discourse Analysis: Conducting discourse analysis of textual elements in European Language Teaching Documentation.
Aims:
Understand the role played by the European University Language Centres in supporting multilingualism, multiculturalism, social inclusion, and in establishing of a more integrated society.
Gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between language, cultural identity and intercultural communication in Europe, at a time of increasing multicultural complexity.