Considering troubled political situation in the Middle East and Asia , immigration has grown rapidly in recent years in Turkey and Europe. Therefore, additional tools are needed in order to integrate the immigrants and refugees arriving in Europe . The core of successful integration is language learning, herein, mobile applications are successful educational resources that can be targeted at the immigrants as a large percentage of them are digitally literate and interested in new opportunities in their new countries. In the framework of this project, we focus on establishing a language-learning solution, this enables the refugees/immigrants to study and learn said language and get familiar with the culture and conception of their new country. This mobile application will be ready for download on the application markets free of cost. Our target group will be the immigrants in Turkey and European countries. LanGo smartphone application will provide refugees and immigrants the advantage of learning the native language of the country in advance after the residence permit has been granted. Other immigrants who have already been living and working in their new home country will benefit from the LanGo applications as well. The application will consist of 5 target languages ( Turkish, English, Dutch, French and Greek ) and at least 6 support languages. These languages will be the most widely spoken by the immigrants in each of the partner countries. The LanGo phone app will include the subjects that are necessary for the first adaptation in the new country including illustrated vocabulary to facilitate recognition and audio visual content to engage users in innovative ways. The topics will involve country-specific concepts to assist integration in each of the partner countries. Our intention is to generate a free basic language course that is easy and fun to use and can be marketed towards end useres with smart effective and creative forms of dissemination. The major impact of the app on the project partner countries is based on prospect. The impact will be significant on region, nation and European-wide scale.The ratings of the applications on the app markets and amount of downloads will measure the projected impact, and the feedback from users is essential to ongoing improvements. Project LanGo is divided in key phases in order to organize and plan project activities and events, and implement the project outputs. Project meetings and other project management activities are anchored in the phases according to topic, expertise of the partners and goals. General phases of implementation are: Project monitoring and Evaluation Quality Assurance & Evaluation Financial reporting and Dissemination LanGo will also go through the following phases specifically: Intellectual Outputs Multiplier Events Pilot Sessions Transnational meetings and Online meetings All 5 project partners have extensive expertise working with projects, both language- and immigrant-related, and all have a large network of contacts that will be utilized.
We wanted to deliver a free, gamified language-learning solution that will help people with refugee or immigrant backgrounds learn the local language and familiarize themselves with the new concepts around them. We wanted to offer a large amount of language content in the target languages (approximately 6000 items, both words and expressions, covering a big variety of topics of crucial importance for immigrants/refugees such as food, transportation, clothes, etc, which is available in all the partner countries with a large selection of relevant refugee support languages so that refugees and immigrants can self study the target languages in their native tongue. In the application, we stated we would include 6 refugee languages, but we have ambitiously included 15 - Arabic, Sorani, Punjabi, Somali, Tigrinya, Urdu, Albanian, Pashto, Farsi, Kurmanji, and the target languages of English, French, Dutch, Greek and Turkish also double as support languages. All this is to make our app as widely accessible and useful as it can be for everybody who needs it. All the vocabulary items in each language have been illustrated by high-quality images and accompanied by audio files for better pronunciation practice. A series of ten animated videos about daily life experiences appear on the app with comprehension questions to better educate newcomers on the language and experiences to be had in their new country. To reach as many people as possible, the app is widely available across multiple platforms including iOS, and Android and accessible as an integrated web application which can be used on any PC.
Undoubtedly, one of immigrants’ top priorities upon arriving in the new country is acquiring a comprehensive knowledge of the local language and to get a detailed understanding of their new surroundings. In most countries, refugees have the possibility of learning the local language through integration courses supplied by the government. However, due to financial and cultural barriers, some of these opportunities may be restricted, creating a need for informal education and training opportunities to supplement the formal courses. In the framework of this project, we have delivered a gamified language-learning solution that will help people with refugee or immigrant backgrounds learn the local language and familiarize themselves with the new concepts around them. Using the smartphone application created within this project will give them a head start in learning the native language of the country while waiting for their decisions from immigration or after the residence permit has been granted. These applications will also be useful for any other immigrants who have already been living and working in their new home country for some time.