Foreign Language Virtual Environment for Primary School Children    Joint Call Educational Multimedia Project N° MM1029

Project Objectives  Language learning takes place either class tutoring based or self-learning based using the following learning material: traditional books, audio tapes, video tapes, CD-ROMs. Each medium has its advantages and disadvantages but none of them have proven to be the best or the unique tool for language learning. It is obvious that the best way to learn a foreign language is at an early age and in a real world environment. The project proposed to create a virtual world in which children can learn by interacting with foreign children without leaving their school or home environment. The underlying technologies to achieve this goal had recently been developed : wide availability of Internet access, VRML tools, tools for 3D realtime multi-user environments. Thus the goal of the proposal was to set-up a virtual realtime language learning network for primary school children throughout Europe. Summary description The VIRLAN language learning network has been composed of the central node, and, in the first stage of demonstration, the four VR pilot sites in the U.K., Finland, Germany, and Greece. This environment allows young children to come together, as if they were physically presenting themeselves. Through facilities of virtual reality and avatar technology, the children are able to «enter» the central meeting place and from there «travel», via the Internet, to different virtual countries, in order to meet and communicate with other children. All virtual country environments were to be built upon open templates, such as interface templates for setting up a local country site, edutainment templates, linguistic templates for the incorporation of dictionaries and phrase books, etc. The software, with the templates and the methodology to set-up a local site was included in a localisation kit. VIRLAN could be used in primary schools as a complementary tool for language learning, but it also had the potential to be used for child-to-child communication on a private basis at home. During the validation phase, an extensive and thorough evaluation of the proposed approach was carried out in the 4 European countries.

Participants	Country		Contact
Exodus S.A. (Coordinator)	GR		George Konstantinidis exodus(at)compulink.gr
Ernst Klett Verlag GmbH (EC)	D		Dr. Jürgen A.Schmidt j.a.schmidt(at)klett.de
Fraunhofer Institut für Arbeitswirtschaft und Organisation	D		Fabian Kempf Fabian.Kempf(at)iao.fhg.de
blaxxun Interactive GmbH	D		Rainer Heigenmoser rainer(at)blaxxun.com
University of Wales Swansea-Center of applied languages	UK		Jim Milton j.l.milton(at)swansea.ac.uk
University of Jyvaeskylae	FIN		Tuula Hirvonen thirvonen(at)iyu.fi
Institute for Language and Speech Processing	GR		Anastasios Patrikakos tasos_p(at)ilsp.gr