PROJECT LANGUAGES

The resources have been prepared in 4 languages: German, Lithuanian, Estonian and Slovenian.

Lithuanian: The Lithuanian education system currently does not adequately serve the needs of children with language impairments. The resources that are available to clinicians are scarce and those that exist are often of poor quality and low efficacy. Since there is an evident lack of adequate resources, Lithuanian speech therapists will undoubtedly benefit from the FREPY resources.

Estonian: Needs analysis has shown that to help children with language problems in Estonia, speech therapists mainly need good pictures for verbs and sentence structures, and tasks with photos with real-life characters; FREPY resources have been created by taking into account these needs of Estonian speech therapists.

German: For German, FREPY materials will serve mainly as additional materials for supporting monolingual and bilingual children since there is a diversity of language/speech therapy and support programs for monolingual German-speaking children (including online tutorials). The development of FREPY materials is also a possibility to implement new research findings in educational context, which can enhance cooperation between educational and research institutions in Germany. During the last two years, the German team had also developed the FREPY materials in Russian, targeting the support of first language in a context of German-Russian bilingualism. This work had been financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Slovenian: Children in Slovenia have different problems, many of which are caused by non-supportive surrounding where they live and the influence of many dialects; the FREPY materials are expected to help children solve some of these communication problems. Slovenian is a specific language, because it has singular, plural and dual form, which is taken into account in the FREPY resources.

Other languages: FREPY products have sufficient potential for commercialization (both on the national and international level), which is suggested by the immense interest of the end-users in the resources and the results of our pilot testing. Therefore, we intend to extend the scope of our products and develop materials in other languages that were not initially included into the project. We have already developed some of the on-line games in Italian (in collaboration with our associated partner ICH) and Russian (in collaboration with our German partners, who work intensively with the Russian-speaking minority in Germany and native speakers of Russian in Russia).