Experiment in Heerlen: language lessons by mobile phone
 | The Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies invites pupils of the higher classes of secondary schools (havo and vwo) located in Heerlen and vicinity(Netherlands) to join in an experiment on language lessons by mobile phone.
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Handy
A mobile phone can be used everywhere. So it would be very handy if for example during a vacation you could look up a word or a sentence in a foreign language. Tim de Jong does research into this area and he invites the pupils from Heerlen’s schools to join an experiment.
Mobile language lessons
The pupils are invited to the Medialab of CELSTEC at the Open Universiteit in Heerlen. There they go to work with the iPhones of the Medialab. With these mobiles they will learn a new foreign language. To make sure it’s a foreign language for all of them, the language will be Hindi. That’s the language of India and Pakistan that is spoken by about 490 million people. The pupils are given a couple of tasks. To accomplish this tasks hey need Hindi words. They can learn these words with the iPhone. The experiment takes 1,5 to 2 hours. Before and after they are asked to fill in a questionnaire. As a reward for their participation, they receive a iTunes bon of 15 euro.
Software
Tim de Jong is a PhD candidate at CELSTEC. His PhD research is focused on developing effective, user friendly software for language acquistion. For this research he organises several experiments, including this experiment with pupils of Heerlen schools and the iPhone. In this experiment he tests how the information should best be presented in a mobile Phone.
For more information on the experiment (in Dutch) and for signing up to join: http://languagelearning.ou.nl/info.
