The SELECT project: Language Engineering in CALL for Learners in the Business Community

The SELECT project (Strategies for European LE-Enhanced Communication Training: EC Project LE4-8304, http://www.wlv.ac.uk/select/) offers new learning opportunities for European managers, equipping them with the cultural competence, language skills and language engineering tools necessary to communicate and operate effectively in a multilingual business environment, assisted by interactive multimedia courseware. This paper will argue that European business managers, as a learning community, have been inadequately serviced in the past in terms of both language and cross-cultural materials. The consequence has been a high rate of failure in cross-border ventures. The SELECT project is a response to the demands of rapid internationalisation. The paper will examine the existing and potential role of electronic language and cultural resources in the learning process, and discuss the re-use of existing resources and the creation of new user-specific resources. In the past, many of these resources have been designed and tailored for language engineers and researchers, rather than for non-specialists in the business community. By outlining the Language Learner’s Workbench, an integral part of SELECT, we will show how such resources can be associated both with learning elements and practical business tasks, and combined in a single, user-friendly software environment. The pedagogic approach which underpins the courseware, and aims at increasing users’ cross -cultural awareness of business practices, will also be described. Some of the resulting multimedia materials, which exemplify culturally bound business practices and also aim to develop language competence, will be demonstrated.