Online lecture “Harnessing students’ multilingualism in English medium classes through Wikipedia editing”
Arqus
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24 May 2021
On 28th May, at 11:30 am CEST, Arqus organizes the online lecture “Harnessing students’ multilingualism in English medium classes through Wikipedia editing” by Francesca Helm, from the Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies at the University of Padua.
Celebrating 20 years of existence at the time of writing, Wikipedia has become one of the most widely used online resources. It is a resource that students are likely to access and read, but few will have actively contributed to, or fully understood – let alone considered in terms of a linguistic or knowledge ecology. Wikipedia is a multilingual resource in that there are Wikipedias in nearly 300 different languages and 89% of Wikipedia articles are in languages other than English.
In this talk I briefly present how Wikipedia has been used in classes with Italian and international students in project-based English class activities which have involved students in analysing and also editing and writing articles in Wikipedia.
Francesca Helm is a researcher at the Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies at the University of Padova, chair of the Education Innovation working group of the Coimbra Group, a European network of universities, and co-coordinator of the Italian section of Scholars at Risk. Her research over the last 10 years has focused on intercultural dialogue, virtual exchange and internationalisation of higher education, including English-medium instruction. She is leading the monitoring and evaluation of the Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange pilot project.
This is the fifth of a series of guest lectures (“Seven months, seven universities”) to be offered in the framework of the Action Line 4 of Arqus, Multilingual and Multicultural University (sub-line 4.8). These lectures focus on specific topics related to language and culture, and target mainly graduate and post-graduate students as well as early-stage researchers interested in those topics.
The webinar will take place on 28th May at 11:30 am CEST. It will be broadcast live on the Arqus YouTube channel.
