This two-year project, which is led by an outstanding UK Primary School, targets young and migrant learners of English, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. It also targets teachers who may be lacking in confidence about their foreign language skills. The project aims to develop a set of Serious Games challenges for both young learners in the Primary sector and migrant children, which will be in the target languages and cover a range of basic topics. They will incorporate assessment materials and will be at a CEFR level A0-A1, but broken down further into 6 sub-levels of progress. The games will be developed as a set of progressive challenges in the different language versions, and trialled and tested in the different country and target group contexts. The focus will be on speaking and listening but with reading as an extension activity. The strategic partnership is therefore one that supports innovation by developing new methodologies and outputs. The objectives are to: • produce a curriculum and learning resources that address the needs in the partner countries and for the different target groups • develop the online platform to host the resources, online communities and the serious games • prepare a structure for the games incorporating progression and the detailed content • develop a progressive set of game challenges which incorporate online assessment • implement a training and support programme • develop, test and refine the training and learning resources • disseminate the outcomes to key stakeholders working in teacher training, the professional development of existing teachers and those working with migrant children. Once the initial framework is in place, teachers will come together in a teaching and learning activity to develop the resources in more detail. These will then be tested in phases in five countries. In total the games will be tested on up to 98 teachers, 60 trainee teachers, 1700 primary school learners and 400 migrant learners. The outputs of the project will be: • curriculum content and target group differentiation • an online platform hosting the resources, providing an online community and a facility for the uploading and sharing of additional resources • a set of serious games challenges, with integrated assessment, covering the topics of: o Greetings and introductions o Personal Information o Numbers and Colours o Family and Friends o Games o Travel o Food and Drink o Activities o Opinions o My School • An evaluation and impact report on the pilots • A set of dissemination materials and seminars in 5 countries • A final international conference • An exploitation plan The initial impact will be a demonstration of improved language learning and motivation for both foreign language learners and migrant pupils learning the new language of the country they have settled in. The project will be supported by an impact study, which will explore the methodologies adopted, the impact, further issues arising from the trials and a set of conclusions relating to the use of Serious Games in language learning.
This three-year project, which was led by a UK Primary School, targeted young and learners of English, French, German, Italian and Portuguese and involved partners from those countries. It also targeted teachers who may be lacking in confidence about their foreign language skills. The project has developed 7 set of Serious Games challenges for young learners in the Primary sector covering seven sets of topics: Greetings and Appearance Numbers and Colours Family and Friends Food and Drinks Games and Activities School Travel and Transport The original plan was to align the games with CEFR levels A0-A1, but the final outputs have gone beyond that and into level A2. The games were developed as a set of progressive challenges in the different language versions, and trialed and tested in the different countries of the partnership. The games use a 3D set of models and each topic is structured in three levels each more or less aligned to CEFR levels. Each level is then subdivided into three scenarios, each with an introduction and then three sets of challenges. This means that each topic has 27 tasks using progressive language content. The focus is on speaking and listening and all topics and tasks have sound files recorded by native speakers to help with both comprehension and pronunciation. Each game also has speech bubbles with a text version but the game was designed with a focus on listening, so that it can be used by pupils with poor literacy or who are not used to a Roman script. Each speech bubble has an icon to listen again and the game will not progress until the pupil chooses a correct answer. This focus on both 3D and listening is the key innovative element of the project. The Games were evaluated in all partner countries with a range of pupils. The outputs of the project are: - a project platform https://www.blabolingo.com/ which hosts the main resources of the project and provides access to the games - the Blabolingo games which are downloadable in both Windows and Mac versions - two instructional videos on how to use the games - a Teachers' Guide which covers how to use the games, sample lesson plans, the language, content, scripts for the scenarios and some case studies The impact has demonstrated improved language learning and motivation for Primary aged pupils of a foreign language. It has also demonstrated a range of different uses in the classroom from introducing new language, to reinforcement and assessment. The project has also shown how the use of the games can be embedded into other language learning approaches such as drama. The use of native speakers has had the added value of supporting teachers whose own language skills are underdeveloped and has helped them with their own pronunciation.