Digi+ is a Dutch-German Computer-Based Learning Environment (CBLE), using the principles of Content and Language Integrated Learning in primary education as a part of the regular curriculum. We will answer research questions on German pupils’ attitudes towards their neighbour language Dutch and on how Digi+ was overall evaluated by pupils.
In this presentation we discuss the Digi+ project, a bilingual Dutch-German Computer-Based Learning Environment (CBLE), aimed at primary school pupils between 8 and 10 years old in the German-Dutch border region and based on the CLIL principle. CLIL refers to teaching subjects such as science and history to pupils through a foreign language (Cenoz 2013). With Digi+ we want to address some shortcomings of other CBLEs developed over the last decade, for instance English as one of the most integrated languages, monolingual ideologies and language separation as a frequent basis and an unequal relation between the focus on language and content learning (Clark et al. 2012; Buendgens-Kosten and Elsner 2018).
We shortly describe the general set-up of Digi+ as well as preliminary results of two German schools who used Digi+ for 3 (topic 'Nutrition') respectively 6 months (topics 'Nutrition' and 'Cereal cultivation') as a part of their regular curriculum. In total we collected data from 80 German pupils before and after the work with Digi+ to measure the effects of the CBLE on the attitudes towards neighbour languages and cultures. To do so, we used an overt and a covert measurement. In addition, after the pilot of Digi+ was completed, pupils used a short questionnaire to evaluate the learning environment.
The preliminary results indicate that the CLIL method was effective. Pupils stated, in line with results from Clark et al. (2012), that they learned a lot about the topics and about the neighbour language and culture as well. In spite of that, there is no evidence so far that the pupils' attitude towards the neighbour language has improved during the pilot. As these results are preliminary, further research is needed to indicate whether or not the pupils' attitudes towards the neighbour language improves through Digi+.
