EU project for fighting illiteracy
The problem:
Poor literacy is important cause for learning problems amongst pupils and adults. Based on an assessment of 8,000 students in 300 Hungarian school classes it is apparent that a significant cause of learning problems is their poor vocabulary and their misunderstanding of the meaning of words.
In analysing the causes of this poor vocabulary an analysis was performed on 99 textbooks of the largest Hungarian educational publishers. This study revealed that the amount of different words in common educational text books is too high. E.g. a 5th grade student comes across 20,000 words – the double amount of words as the average vocabulary of adults contains. Even more worrying is that students do not notice passing through misunderstood words. They only realize their misunderstanding when they have already passed most of the learning texts, when reaching the conclusion that they have not understood anything.
Poor literacy limits the social coherence and limits European integration in the European Union, because deficiencies in the mother language are directly related to learning difficulties in foreign languages. In the EU such difficulties have a major effect because it results e.g. in the immobility of adult employees.
Main goals of the project:
1. The improvement of the literacy (reading) competencies of students, by improving their mother language skills in combination with learning foreign languages.
2. To fight illiteracy among adults in the European Union.
The planned actions will be based on open-source distance-learning software:
The feasibility of the planned actions has been proven with the help of the Hungarian Pedagogical Association. Therefore the broad actions for this project consist of:
· Writing texts which assist students to develop their vocabulary in a proper gradient.
· A special multilingual dictionary to help authors and students. Currently this dictionary contains already 10,000 words in 6 languages, illustrated by pictures.
· Furthering the learning process and assessing the results.
The resulting system will assist children and adults alike to deal with:
· Illiteracy
· Dyslexia
· Reading problems
· Misunderstanding of the meaning of words
Target groups:
Students of primary schools, grammar schools and vocational schools, also adult education (lifelong learning), civil organizations and companies.
Results to be achieved:
1. Develop educational materials to improve reading skills
2. Dictionary with a database of explanations and pictures
3. Learning software and interactive learning materials developed for different age groups
4. Means to define readability
5. Special course for educating the trainers and mentors
6. 1000 children educated by this program in its pilot stage in one year
Implementation steps and timing of the project:
Participants of the consortium:
· Universities (research tasks and scientific control of developed materials),
· Schools (practical experiment of materials and methods),
· Non-profit organizations (developing materials and consulting on different topics of everyday life).
The project is planned for a 5-year period. It is divided into two main phases:
1. Phase 1 (3 years):
a) Research and development assessments for the vocabulary of students in several fields of life (everyday life, environment protection, drug prevention, the world of work),
b) Developing materials for improvement of the vocabulary of the consortium’s participants,
c) Pilot developing projects at schools and final assessments.
2. Phase 2 (2 years):
a) Distributing the project to other countries, expanding the scope of materials and translating them into further languages.
b) Ensuring the long term financing of the project by involving institutions and companies. They can use the open system as a base of developing own business-goal materials, and pay for this.
WP list
WP1. To extend the open source dictionary up to 30.000 words with pictures, explanations and mind maps for the 24 official languages of EU.
WP2. To design open source interactive learning materials and assessments involving people from all affected countries.
WP3. Training activities. In this WP it is planned to conduct model educational program for 1000 children with reading problems. Those children will be fully educated using developed learning tool over a period of 3 years. Special course for train the trainers and teachers has to be carried out to disseminate the project results.
WP4. Extending the open source software framework to ensure the effective and flexible use of multilingual dictionary and database of materials for all participants.
WP5. Developing a proper communication system for following the authors’ work, teachers’ activities and the learning process of students.
WP6. Dissemination, including a user voting system for optimization the dictionary and learning materials.
WP7. Project management
Commercialization
The project implementation will be followed up with the commercialization of the software.
The whole system will be open source, open content and can be used free for non-profit purposes. Built on the principle of Wikipedia, user will have an opportunity to add materials and explanation of words in the multilingual dictionary. This should be especially interesting for multinational companies and institutions.
Companies will have a reduction of software price if they contribute to the open dictionary.
Responsible organisation
The newly established European Institute of Knowledge Transfer, an association under Belgian law (Association Internationale Sans But Lucratif – aisbl), based on the European Parents Association and the Hungarian Pedagogical Association.