What's this all about?!

This software is being produced as a fourth year project, as part of the Applied Computational Linguistics degree at DCU. The project title is: 'Web-based interactive language learning tool - teaching children beginners French and German', and is being completed by Cara Greene and Katrina Keogh, as our final year project.

The project grew from our third year project, which you can read here. Our third year project was a CALL (Computer-aided Language Learning) project. At this stage, we planned to research the CALL area and develop software for children aged between 10 and 13, to teach them beginners French and German. The software would be predominantly geared towards 5th and 6th class primary school children, to help make the transition between primary and secondary school less difficult, along with giving them a headstart in learning a foreign language. In order to gain first-hand knowledge of teaching, we volunteered to teach both German and French at a local primary school, for two 45-minute sessions per week (per language). Our aim was to have 3 weeks of traditional classroom-based teaching and one week using the CALL software we had developed, per month. The CALL software was initially developed as a revision aid to reinforce the work covered in class. We now hope that it could indeed be used independently to learn a foreign language.

In carrying on with the project in fourth year, we taught sixth class students in the Virgin Mary Boy's National School in Ballymun, for the duration October 2001 to March 2002. During this period, we developed:

Beginner's Curriculum

Classplans for each classroom-based lesson, along with each CALL lab session

Updated the software to include new material, along with exercises. Newer versions of the software also incorporated input from the children.

A class-log for each lesson. It contains an account of what happened in each class, any problems we encountered and any observations we made.

We realised that the material had to be specifically designed to cater for the type of children we were teaching. The school is located in a disadvantaged area, so some of the children have learning difficulties along with behavioural problems. Alot of redrafting and redesigning of material was necessary.

We both found the teaching aspect very enjoyable! You can view our picture gallery to get a glimpse of some of the highlights and the class we taught.