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Virtual Langu@ge learning through edutainment activities
Start date: Jan 1, 2009,

The goal of the VILL@GE proposal is to set-up a virtual reality language learningnetwork for primary school children and higher education students throughout Europe.The language learning network will consist of a central node and three VR pilot sites inthe U.K., Greece and Hungary. It will provide entertaining, game-like activities that willmotivate the user to invest on his needs/wishes/ambitions for broadening his foreignlanguage knowledge horizons.This environment will allow young people from the three countries to come together, asif they were physically present in the same place. Through facilities of virtual reality andavatar technology, the users will be able to “enter” the central meeting place andvirtually travel, over the Net, to different virtual countries, in order to meet andcommunicate with other European youngsters. All virtual countries environments will bebuilt upon open templates, such as interface templates for setting up a local country site,edutainment templates, linguistic templates for the incorporation of dictionaries andphrase books, etc. These templates will be designed and implemented in such a way asto facilitate the inclusion of new languages and additional content targeting even moreage groups. Within the project, these templates will be filled with curriculum relatedcontent (according to the user’s age) for each language of the participating countries;nevertheless, the templates will be implemented in a coded form that will provide astraightforward inclusion of any other language.The software, with the templates and the methodology to set-up a local site will beincluded in a localisation kit, to be sold to local distributors, according to the licensingmethod. VILL@GE will be used in primary schools and universities as a complementarytool for language learning, but it will also provide users with the ability to log-on fromtheir homes and initiate direct communication and gaming sessions. During thevalidation phase, an extensive and thorough evaluation of the proposed approach willbe carried out, in order to assess the effectiveness, efficiency and efficacy of theproposed language learning approach. By identifying new training needs, andsuggesting innovative ways of surpassing educative constraints, the consortiumsupports the promulgation of a socially coherent and knowledge driven Europe.
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