Teaching Language Technology At The North-West University

The BA Language Technology program was recently introduced at the North-West University and is, to date, the only of its kind in South Africa. This paper gives an overview of the program, which consists of computational linguistic subjects as well as subjects from languages, computer science, mathematics, and statistics. A brief discussion of the content of the program and specifically the computational linguistics subjects, illustrates that the BA Language Technology program is a vocationally directed, future oriented teaching program, preparing students for both future graduate studies and a career in language technology. By means of an example, it is then illustrated how students and researchers alike benefit from working side by side on research and development projects by using a problembased, project-organized approach to curriculum design and teaching.