Interactive Tales is a digital storytelling application with an added gaming aspect for language practice. It aims to help children in elementary school develop their heritage language or learn a new language by extending their exposure to and practice with world languages.
Knowing multiple languages is a critical skill to have for 21st century students. However, opportunities to practice using non-dominant languages can be scarce for some. Children who speak a different language at home tend to decline in their ability to use that language as they become more involved with the society using the dominant language. Children who speak the dominant language at home tend to have limited opportunities to learn a second language, especially in monolingual schools. Existing learning materials for heritage or second language development are often designed for older audiences or adapted from those written for native speakers (with more advanced language and sometimes culturally irrelevant references). Digital technology can be used to facilitate children’s language development. Digital storytelling has been demonstrated to be effective for young elementary school students’ language learning. Digital storytelling is believed to help children’s progressive understanding of linguistic structure, vocabulary, sound patterns, and prosody of a language (e.g., Dickinson, 2001). However, while many digital storybooks have text and a read aloud function, they are limited in engaging students in writing practice. By combining digital “choose-your-own adventure” stories and games, Interactive Tales (I-Tales) aims to help children in elementary school develop their heritage language or learn a new language by extending their exposure to and practice with world languages.
This session will demonstrate and discuss I-Tales, an emerging tablet app, aimed to address the need to support children’s heritage or second language acquisition. The app targets early elementary school children and their parents since language fluency, particularly pronunciation and intonation, can be better developed with language exposure and instruction at an earlier age. Unlike other digital language learning programs designed for older audiences, I-Tales capitalizes on children’s developing abilities and learning process by incorporating playful aesthetics, highlighting children’s sense of agency, and providing suitable scaffolding and adaptive feedback.
Within the application, learners create a main avatar that progresses through numerous stories with different levels of language difficulty. As learners pick different paths, they can see the immediate consequences of one path over the other. Stories are narrated to help learners acquire pronunciation and prosody particular to the specific language. Glossing is embedded to help enhance reading comprehension and vocabulary acquisition. A list of vocabulary words is also generated from the glossing feature to help parents or instructors view words that the learner clicked on. Writing practice is presented to the learner in the form of a game.
While I-Tales can be extended to all languages, this session will demonstrate a prototype of the Mandarin Chinese version of the application. Evaluation of this app will include an analysis of students’ performance on a pre-and post-assessment. Evaluation will also examine usage patterns and learner preferences.