Presently the ‘Language learning in the wild network’ is established in 4 Nordic countries. Below you see our activities from the previous years.
Understanding the Village
The goal of this first workshop was to develop a common understanding of the Icelandic Village project and to begin preparations for the summer pilot course/village as well as establishing the theoretical underpinnings of the project and exploring possible teaching and learning methods and support material.
The Industrial Design MA thesis project deals with the observation that immigrants with little former study experience, often finds todays’ theoretic Swedish education as too big of a challenge. This leads to that many learners lose motivation and self-esteem, ‘get stuck’ in the education for years or give up and end up in segregation.
This 12-week course introduced design ethnography, collaborative design, and service design techniques to explore the questions: What are current ways that people learn to participate in Sweden and Swedish? What are new roles that Swedish speakers, and public and private service providers can play in supporting language as participation? What new and old technologies and service concepts can support or promote ‘language as participation’?
In December 2013 a two day conference was held in Odense and Kolding, by the University of Southern Denmark. The topic of the two days was ‘Designing for language learning in the wild‘ and the days held presentations of conducted and ongoing research, design projects, pilot projects as well as explorative design and theater workshops. Researchers, designers, teachers and students from Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Iceland participated in the activities.
Designing for Language Learning in the Wild: creating social infrastructures for second language learning.
The first workshop will focus on user activities outside of the classroom and the development of tangible resources for learning, i.e. material that affords understanding (segmentation), remembering and construction based production. The workshop will result in video models available on the project's portal, tangible material to be shared, and e-publication targeted at practitioners and a co-authored paper for a design journal.
Project goal: Develop robust examples of theoretically grounded, individually focused, socially anchored L2 learning practices to provide migrants, especially middle class professionals, with a short way into the new language and the new society.
