In education, infographics may be used to promote active learning and engage learners in the creation of more diverse learning artefacts. This study aims to analyze the application of infographics in higher education. The authors conducted a scoping review of the scientific articles to analyze the use of infographics across a variety of university subjects. The findings revealed that the most frequent educational practices were those that merged both ready-made infographics and students’ hands-on experience in creating their own infographics. Such learning activities facilitated the learning of the subject-related material and helped students to advance with the creation of this popular form of modern communication. The tasks including infographics also represented an enhanced mission of higher education as students were given opportunities to develop a number of personal and career readiness skills and capabilities simultaneously, such as digital, visual and information literacy, critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration skills. The educational recommendations and technological solutions proposed might diversify teaching and learning practices in higher education.

Higher education is frequently criticized for inadequate preparation of students so that they could become successful in their studies, future lives and careers. Students tend to lack higher-order thinking skills, in particular problem solving skills. What the new face of a university foreign language course might be is not simply learning languages but also integrating the development of the most important skills of the 21st century ⿿ higher-order thinking, problem-solving, self-directed learning, communication and collaboration with the ability to demonstrate these skills using a foreign language. Problem-based learning (PBL) is a unique approach that allows achieving this and therefore needs to be more increasingly implemented even in the field of foreign language education. There is much literature that explains curricular change in the field of PBL demonstrating the value of this approach to students, educators and institutions; however, there is little research to date that has explored PBL in foreign language education. Based on the scientific literature review method, this article addresses the issue of why PBL is a relevant approach to be implemented in foreign language education and suggests ways of its implementation. PBL can help revitalize foreign language learning in higher education as it can create meaningful and authentic communication central to the learning process, where language learning is coupled with learning how to solve ill-structured problems. Students move from reproductive to creative and meaningful language use, which undoubtedly contributes to meaningful learning and increased motivation

Artificial Intelligence (AI) occupies a transforming role in education, including language teaching and learning. Using bibliometric analysis, this study aims to overview the most recent research related to the use of AI in language education. Specifically, it reviews the existing body of research, productivity in this field in terms of authors and countries, co-authorship, most cited references and most popular journals that publish on this topic. Furthermore, the study also analyses the most common keywords and extracts relevant terms that reveal trending topics. For the period between 2018 and 2022, 2,609 documents were retrieved from the Web of Science database. The results showed that each year a consistent number of publications on the application of AI in language education appears. Scholars from China and the USA have been revealed to be most productive. Computer Assisted Language Learning contains the highest number of publications. Within the research on the use of AI in language education, the most targeted language-learning aspects were acquisition, motivation, performance, vocabulary, instruction, feedback, and impact. The analysis of the most common keywords related to AI-based solutions showed that mobile-assisted language learning, virtual reality, augmented reality, elements of gamification, games, social robots, machine translation, intelligent tutoring systems, chatbots, machine learning, neural networks, automatic speech recognition, big data, and deep learning were most popular.

Reconsidering University Educational Environment for the Learners of Generation Z

The translation of proper names is one of the most challenging activities every translator faces. While working on children’s literature, the translation is especially complicated since proper names usually have various allusions indicating sex, age, geographical belonging, history, specific meaning, playfulness of language and cultural connotations. The goal of this article is to draw attention to strategic choices for the translation of proper names in children’s literature. First, the article presents the theoretical considerations that deal with different aspects of proper names in literary works and the issue of their translation. Second, the translation strategies provided by the translation theorist Eirlys E. Davies used for this research are explained. In addition, the principles of adaptation of proper names provided the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language are presented. Then, the discussion proceeds to the quantitative analysis of the translated proper names with an emphasis on providing and explaining numerous examples. The research has been carried out on four popular fantasy books translated from English and German by three Lithuanian translators. After analyzing the strategies of preservation, localization, transformation and creation, the strategy of localization has proved to be the most frequent one in all translations.

The mission of higher education institutions is to prepare future professionals for a rapidly changing labor market, yet what skills we teach students, and how we teach them, is highly problematic. The ability to collaborate is crucial for success in professional and academic endeavor; the challenge for foreign language educators is to shift the focus of courses in ways that address the development of collaboration skills. Yet, this also becomes a challenge in scholarly literature on English for Specific Purposes (ESP), since research in this field has been somewhat limited, i.e., most commonly it investigates collaborative writing as a way of developing collaboration. Furthermore, the explicit teaching of collaboration, as well as the inclusion of diverse tasks to enhance collaboration, are often neglected by researchers. Also neglected in this field of research are the challenges and opportunities that students experience while learning to collaborate during ESP classes. The paper aims at acquiring more in-depth insights into the phenomenon of collaboration during ESP classes to facilitate the practice of language educators who can no longer neglect the urgent need to develop collaboration through their classes. The authors of the paper, who were also the designers of ESP tasks, sought to develop collaboration skills by both engaging learners in collaborative tasks and integrating additional measures to address this skill. Qualitative data acquired via observations and semi-structured interviews revealed that such tasks could contribute to students’ overall performance to improve language proficiency because they enhance motivation and engagement. Apart from collaboration skills, they contribute to the development of many essential skills vital for engagement in the twenty-first century workplace. Notwithstanding, they pose challenges to students and this indicates the need for more frequent collaborative tasks and progress with additional measures that develop students’ collaboration abilities in higher education.