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From: Licia Calvi <calvi@uia.ua.ac.be>
Subject: research job offfer
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Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 14:03:49 GMT
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RESEARCH JOB OFFER



As humanities education reflects increasing concern with cultural diversity and with fostering an understanding of multiple perspectives on the world, educators are drawn to hyper/multimedia environments, in particular to AHS. 
Hypermedia components are indeed used in educational systems to provide user-driven exploration of educational material,  to account for the different goals and knowledge expertise of multiple users, and to supply with navigational support on various levels, e.g., from commenting on existing links to suggesting the best link to follow.

In language learning the new communicative methodologies strive to prepare students not only to study the literature of foreign countries, but to interact with contemporary speakers in a culturally appropriate manner, as well as to focus on different aspects of the same culture.
Such an approach necessitates the use of different sources (i.e., film and video materials as well as print examples of "realia", like newspaper advertisements and announcements, as a source of the language as it is actually used by native speakers in their natural environment), and implies a redefinition of the meaning of linguistic communication within this special medium. It fosters a sense that, say,  the Italian spoken by a tradesman and by a banker, during negotiations and during a formal meeting, in
 business letters and in telephonic conversations, differ from one another in ways that reveal much that is important to know about the culture. 
Such trends (i.e. the move to communicative language-teaching using authentic language spoken by native speakers; the interest in culture as a totality incorporating visual as well as textual material; the emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration; the need to think in global terms and to reinforce awareness of multiple perspectives) pose a challenge of how to maintain such a broad perspective without becoming disoriented.
Part of the solution will be the design of appropriate support tools to facilitate the creation of and the access to hypermedia knowledge corpora.

With this in mind, we are looking for a person interested in working in this direction, i.e., in the definition of a AHS in LSP, specifically a business language, on a two-year project.

For further details, please contact:


Prof. W. GEERTS
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
University of Antwerp (UIA)
Universiteitsplein, 1
2610 Wilrijk (Antwerp)
phone  +32 3 820 28 19
fax      +32 3 820 28 23
wgeerts@uia.ua.ac.be    

Deadline: as soon as possible, and not later than mid-November.

