An inside view of the COST-ERN-LWE IS0703 program

Abstract

1 General Information on the COST-ERN-LWE IS0703 ProgramDuring the past ten years, higher education in Romania has benefitted from the partnerships and alliances with various foreign academic institutions. One of the programs that have encouraged co-operation between teachers and researchers in Europe is COST (Co-operation in Science and Technology), whose aim has been to bring together European research teams, to offer them a proper environment for pedagogical discussing their innovative ideas in the field of science and technology and to create a network of researchers, able to spread their knowledge across the entire continent.One of the main objectives of COST has been to lay the basis for a European Research Network on Learning to Write Effectively (ERN-LWE), with a view to helping professionals and ordinary people to improve their techniques of writing technical documentation and to disseminate knowledge across cultural boundaries.The Actions of European COST IS0703 ERN-LWE took place between 2008 and 2011 in various cities in Europe (e.g. Barcelona, Padua, Potsdam, Brest, Poitiers) and were organized by the University of Poitiers, France, in co-operation with various partners (e.g. universities, research centers, multi-national companies etc.). Their purposes were the optimization of writing strategies and the enhancement of European citizens' interest in well-written technical documentation, such as user's guides or manuals, scientific articles or informative leaflets or brochures.The issue of Technical Writing was approached from a Europe-specific perspective, laying emphasis on cultural diversity, technological development and teaching methods in various universities and research centers across Europe. Junior and senior researchers, as well as teachers from the member states of the European Union were offered research grants in other countries and the opportunity to attend Training Schools that provided lectures, seminars and workshops on the major themes of the common project. Moreover, there were guests from the United States, who shared their experience, gained during similar programs developed in America, with their colleagues from Europe.Conceived as an interactive, multi-disciplinary and inter-cultural network, meant to offer insights into the same issue from various perspectives, the European Research Network on Learning to Write Effectively was structured on four different working groups (WGs), with members from various European countries. Each group had its own objectives and tackled one major issue of writing research, as follows:1) WG 1 was dedicated to the early acquisition of writing skills, focusing on teaching writing to very young learners from the primary schools across Europe, in monolingual or multilingual contexts. They designed questionnaires addressed to students, parents and teachers, analyzed the answers, compared the data from various countries and, finally, elaborated a strategy including the steps to be taken in order to make writing a more attractive and inter-active subject, with a view to encouraging children's written production at the lexical, syntactic and textual levels.2) WG 2 aimed at analyzing the academic genres in different European countries, focusing on the variations in function, structure or style, in order to improve written communication in education and in the workplace. The resulting studies were dedicated to the processes implied by different genres (e.g. online writing behavior, keystroke logging, reaction time, etc.), the quality of the texts they produced, the characteristics of each type of learner (e.g. academic, student, professional, etc.) and the characteristics of each task involved in the writing process.3) WG 3 had as its main goal to enhance the quality of technical documents, by studying their production and reception, by recommending various new strategies to improve the design of written documentation in the workplace, by evaluating the quality and usability of the technical documents that already existed on the European market and by conceiving new methods and computer programs meant to assist the production of well-written user's guides, instruction leaflets or brochures and technical manuals. …