About the project
When children move to Norway from outside the Nordics, their successful integration into society depends to a large extent on how well and how fast they acquire Norwegian. With rising numbers of immigrants coming to Norway and the other Nordic countries, there is increased need for language education and language education tools.
The TEFLON project is a Nordic collaboration funded by NordForsk. Research groups in Finland, Sweden and Norway look at different aspects of how the digital language learning game Pop2Talk can benefit children’s learning of new languages. The game has already been tested for Finnish children learning English (Uther et al. 2018), and the different groups within TEFLON will develop it for more languages. As part of the Norwegian research group, I will contribute to the development of a Norwegian version of Pop2Talk.
Methods
Children with different language backgrounds, living in Norway, will play the Norwegian version of the game. We will test the children before and after the playing period. By comparing the results from before and after we would like to find out whether playing improves children’s language skills. Using methods such as EEG (following Junttila et al. 2022), voice recordings and questionnaires I will assess the development of different aspects of language learning:
- Language production will be investigated through speech recordings
- Language perception will be investigated with EEG
- Literacy and word learning will be investigated with tests before and after playing the game
Duration
2022-2025
References
Junttila, K., Smolander, A. R., Karhila, R., Giannakopoulou, A., Uther, M., Kurimo, M., Ylinen, S. (2018) Gaming enhances learning-induced plastic changes in the brain. Brain and Languange, 230, 105124. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2022.105124
Uther, M., Smolander, A.-R., Junttila, K., Kurimo, M., Karhila, R., Enarvi, S., & Ylinen, S. (2018). User Experiences from L2 Children Using a Speech Learning Application: Implications for Developing Speech Training Applications for Children. Advances in Human-Computer Interaction, 2018, 7345397. https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/7345397