The ability to communicate with prospective new business partners is a fundamental language skill that is frequently lacking within EU countries where companies, particularly SMEs, are seeking global business opportunities. For the life sciences industry this is a known barrier to business growth. EasySpeak is a 2-year activity that will develop a core vocabulary of 500 words and phrases in those languages known from previously funded Leonardo project work to be critical for global business development. It will develop this learning via an online learning platform using an open educational resources approach. The selected languages include several perceived “hard to learn” languages that will assist participants to gain sufficient knowledge to begin a meaningful dialogue in the selected foreign language. EasySpeak will then develop a further 500 word vocabulary that is sector specific to the life sciences industry to facilitate further business engagement and then test the transferability of this core vocabulary into four further sectors. Five partners, from four EU countries will develop the materials for the “hard to learn” (non EU) languages, including Japanese, Korean, Arabic and Chinese as well as for six further (EU) languages. Two of the partners are specialist life sciences cluster groups, that bring sector knowledge of need and routes to market for the materials. The other three partners are vocational education training specialists that provide the key understanding of the development of educational online learning resources and the specific skills in the selected languages. The UK partners will develop the learning platform and test it with English and an EU language whilst the other partners develop their allocated core language vocabularies and sector specific vocabulary. By the end of Year 1 the ten core vocabularies will be available as an OER platform, with work proceeding to develop the sector specific vocabulary and test the transferability of the materials into four further sectors - advanced manufacturing, ICT, tourism and public services.. The adoption of a simple to use host platform that does not require a large amount of online storage capacity offers partners and other agencies the facility to incorporate EasySpeak into their normal business offer. The development of this sustainable model is a critical factor, with up-to-date IT systems being selected that have minimal additional cost implications for storage, hosting and updating. Ten language vocabularies will be developed into an online open educational resource with analytics used to monitor usage levels and time spent accessing the materials and will gather feedback from users. The partners all have extensive business and educational facing databases which will be used as dissemination tools to the business community, business support agencies and local, regional and national agencies that have an interest in developing language skills for learners in both the difficult to learn languages as well as the more common EU languages. The transferability of this core language model is expected to demonstrate the longer term need for sector specific vocabularies to be developed for other sectors that are critical to business growth for EU based businesses in the global economic marketplace.
Functional not fluent. The ability to communicate with prospective new business partners is a fundamental language skill that is frequently lacking within EU countries where companies, particularly SMEs, are seeking global business opportunities. The life sciences sector being a global industry this is a known barrier to business growth. EasySpeak was a 2-year activity that developed a core vocabulary of over 500 words and phrases in those languages known from previously funded Leonardo project work to be critical for global business development. This learning was developed via an online learning platform using an open educational resources approach. The selected languages include European languages (English, French, Greek, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish) and some perceived “hard to learn” languages (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean). EasySpeak then developed a further 500 words vocabulary that is specific to business conversation and the life sciences industry to facilitate further business engagement and then tested the transferability of this core vocabulary into four other sectors: advanced manufacturing, ICT, tourism and public services. Five partners, from four EU countries worked on the development of the language materials and platform as well as on the dissemination strategy and sustainability plan. Two of the partners are specialist life sciences cluster groups (Bioindustry Park and One Nucleus) that bring sector knowledge of need and routes to market for the materials. The other three partners (ALOS, EDCCC and RLN) are vocational education training specialists that provide the key understanding of the development of educational online learning resources and the specific skills in the selected languages. The result of the project is an online platform available here: http://easy-speak.today and accessible at no charge by any computer or mobile device users. The adoption of a simple to use host platform that does not require a large amount of online storage capacity offers partners and other agencies the facility to incorporate EasySpeak into their normal business offer. The platform contains over 1000 words and phrases of general conversation, business and life sciences vocabulary translated in 10 different languages available in writing and audio files. The platform has been disseminated by partners to local companies and agencies and has had a positive impact on those willing to expand abroad that is related in the case studies. It has also been tested on other sector specialists in advanced manufacturing, ICT, tourism and public services and was adopted - likely highlighting a longer term need for sector specific vocabularies to be developed for other sectors that are critical to business growth for EU based businesses in the global economic marketplace.