The QuILL project: embracing digital technology in LSP teaching in higher education

Digital education readiness has been much promoted by the European Union through the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (Redecker, 2017) and education stakeholders, whose aim is to foster the improvement of digital competences of both teachers and students within the education area. The European project QuILL – Quality in Language Learning, approved in the scope of the call ‘Strategic Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness’, embraces the challenge of providing higher education lecturers and students with digital technology-based teaching resources supporting them in their teaching and learning. With more than 360 teaching and learning resources available on the QuILL portal, the higher education (HE) lecturers are offered a plethora of open educational online resources (OER) for 18 European languages focusing on Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP). These have been tested and validated in real-case teaching scenarios allowing thus the teachers to use or adapt the resources suggested as well as the methodologies provided as guidelines. The aim of this paper is to showcase some of these resources and demonstrate how digital tools and resources account for more innovative methodologies when teaching LSP, following Arnó (2012). Moreover, we shall also focus on the project’s second Intellectual Output (IO2) which consists in the creation of an e-learning based package addressed to higher education LSP lecturers specifically aimed to guide them in innovating their language teaching methodologies through the effective use of quality digital based OER teaching sources. Three different modules comprise this package addressing the identification, use and creation of quality digital based language teaching source. We shall provide results that attest the impact and effectiveness of this e-learning based package by means of case studies on the three modules and the results of interactive tests assessing lecturers’ knowledge on the main aspects focused on in the e-learning package.