User scenarios

The use of English has increased over the last decade in society in general as well as in higher education – both in teaching and in teaching material. Much attention is directed towards domain loss caused by the parallel use of English and Danish and the so-called threat of English taking over as the primary teaching language – especially in higher education. But English is also introduced at an early stage at primary school, secondary school and at high school level. Furthermore, in public affairs it has proven necessary to introduce English as a lingua franca to be able to communicate with citizens of different nationalities and origin. Therefore, we identified the following user group scenarios:

• Parallel use of English and Danish in primary and secondary schools
• Parallel use of English and Danish in high schools
• Parallel use of English and Danish in Universities
• Public authorities: knowledge structuring and dissemination in foreign languages (SKAT / borger.dk)

We plan to test all potential user groups by creating a scenario including the use of a term base with access to terminology and concept diagrams for problem-solving in order to show whether this improves the performance. For this test environment, we have created a database and a portal with three search interface options which give the user the possibility to choose between three views (advanced search, limited search and search in diagrams only), see http://dtb.i-term.dk.