My previous two interventions focused on learning foreign languages and build people’s confidence. Then I developed my intervention 1 and 2 to design my intervention 3.
Secondary recourses:
Stephen Krashen on language acquisition
His theory of language learning is “We acquire language in one way and only one way: when we understand messages. We call this comprehensible input. We acquire language when we understand what people tell us. Comprehensible input has been the last resort of the language teaching profession. Picture, knowledge of the world, realia, etc., helps language acquisition.”
Factors that relate to success in language acquisition:
- Motivation
- Self-esteem
- Anxiety
People acquire language in one way, when they get comprehensible input in a low anxiety environment.
Intervention 3
Stakeholders: People who want to learn a new language.
Platform: Language lesson game
Intention: Encourage people to learn a language in a more efficient way and reduce anxiety.
Question supporting the intervention: How can people acquire new language?
Activity allowing users to engage:
Based on the theory of Stephen Krashen, I designed this intervention. I found two similar short Spanish sentences.
The first sentence only has the Spanish audio. It is: Ésta es mi casa. En ella hay una sala, una cocina y tres dormitories.
The second sentence has the Spanish audio and some drawing. It is: Ésta es mi habitación. En ella hay una mesa y dos sillas.
I played these two sentences two times to 5 non-Spanish speakers to test if they can remember some vocabularies.
Feedback:
All of them cannot fully understand the first sentence and they cannot remember any vocabularies.
For the second sentence, everyone can understand its meaning by the image. All of them cannot remember all the vocabularies but they can recognise some of them.
The participators said it’s not easy to learn a new language by only listening few times but they find it can be a good way to learn new languages.
From this intervention, I showed the people that they can understand a new language without translating every word so that to reduce their anxiety of language learning.