Who is running this project?
The University of Reading, in a project with eight other partners from four European countries, has built a strategic partnership across Europe that aims to:
- Contribute to higher quality language teaching across primary schools;
- Converge standards and;
- Develop an assessment tool for learning modern foreign languages at primary level.
What is this project about?
‘The Language Magician’ game gave the project its name, and is an assessment tool in schools which will support the learning and teaching of foreign languages at a primary school level. Led by the Goethe Institute, it builds on the Nuffield Primary Modern Languages project by Dr Louise Courtney and Professor Suzanne Graham.
The Language Magician went live in March 2018 and is freely available from the project website. To date it has a dissemination reach of around 2 million people. After submission of the final project report in August 2018, The Language Magician was awarded the Erasmus+ Quality Seal in the schools sector and marked as good practice project on the Erasmus+ project results platform.
The game is fun for children, while building on their language and IT skills, and providing information on their progression. It supports teachers and practitioners by giving them a tool to assess their pupil’s abilities in writing, reading and listening comprehension, using non-threatening testing methods.
Researchers are able to access anonymised raw data to conduct in-depth analysis of task results such as the nature of learner progression in listening, reading, and writing, test the reliability and validity of assessment data, develop vocabulary recognition and production, link between motivation and task results, and if there are any gender differences in performance and motivation.
The Language Magician is funded by the European Commission.
