Newcastle University

Prof Paul Seedhouse (ECLS) and Prof Patrick Olivier (Computing Science) have been awarded a grant of £156,000 from the EPSRC Digital Economy Programme on “Research in the Wild: Getting research out there”. Entitled Language Learning in the Wild, the project aims to develop the next generation of technology applied to language teaching, namely the use of digital sensors together with a Task-Based Learning approach.

Specifically, the project will build digital kitchens that speak to the users in French and give them step-by-step instructions on how to prepare French cuisine. Sensors are attached to all equipment and ingredients so that each time an item is correctly or incorrectly moved, participants can be given appropriate verbal feedback. Users learn targeted grammar and vocabulary items by doing the task and do a test on those items on a digital screen at end of cooking. Participants are equipped with a headset and microphone and can request a repetition or a translation of what the kitchen is saying to them. This project adapts the technology of Newcastle’s existing Ambient Kitchen to the field of language learning.

The project is a collaboration between iLAB:Learn, Newcastle University’s new centre of excellence in technology-enhanced education, and SiDE, the RCUK Digital Economy Research Hub on “Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy” based at Newcastle University. The prototype of the digital kitchen will be developed in one of Newcastle College’s large training kitchens by trialling it with students studying Catering and French. We record and analyse student interaction whilst cooking and this will feed into materials and software design. We will install the final, trialled version of the kitchen in the central London premises of CILT, the National Centre for Languages, who are our dissemination partner.

A number of problems are addressed by this project: the universal problem of classroom language teaching, namely that students are rehearsing the language, rather than actually using the language to carry out actions, and the difficulty of bringing the foreign culture to life in the classroom. With the kitchen, learners will be able to learn aspects of the language whilst performing a meaningful real-world task and will simultaneously experience the cultural aspect of learning to cook a French dish. The project offers the opportunity of taking the excellent research-based pedagogical principles and procedures developed by Task-Based Language Teaching over the years out of the classroom and into use in real-world applications.

In terms of the broader social context, the pedagogical design of the situated language learning system is intended to create a transferable, interdisciplinary model of task-based, situated learning which can be applied to many different technological settings and many different skill and knowledge sets. A significant challenge for the UK is how to employ the available digital technology to upgrade the skills of its workforce in a rapidly changing world. The project will start in May 2010 and run for 18 months.