Home

NEWS

14–15 September 2012 – An international conference was held to mark the end of the project. The conference was entitled "Empowering Children with Non-typical Speech and Language Development" and was hosted by the Faculty of Humanities of Vytautas Magnus University (Kaunas, Lithuania).

The conference aimed at bringing together researchers and practitioners (speech and language therapists, linguists, psycholinguists, and teachers, etc.) who share an interest in exploring non typical language development in children from multiple perspectives, including speech and language intervention. The main objective of the conference was to present and discuss various aspects of non-typical child language development with a special focus on the practical applications of scientific research.

The conference participants were researchers from different disciplines, such as linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychology, education et al. whose studies focus on the following topics:

  • typical and non-typical language acquisition
  • speech and language impairments
  • educational challenges for children with special needs
  • diagnosis of speech and language impairments
  • speech and language intervention
  • new theories and methods in language intervention

The conference programme in English can be accessed here.

 

PROJECT DEVELOPMENT:

20–24 August 2012 – The project team members Laura Čubajevaitė and Aurelija Tamošiūnaitė participated in the Sociolinguistics Symposium 19 that was held at Freie Universitaet Berlin (Berlin, Germany). FREPY leaflets and cards were presented, distributed, and shared among the conference participants to ensure the visibility of FREPY in a wider context of sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic research

 

31 July 2012 – Printed FREPY games have already been released! You can read about them here: German, Estonian, Lithuanian, Slovenian.

 

 

5–8 July 2012 – The project poster was presented at the international conference "SLI – Specific Language Impairment – diagnosis, prognosis, intervention" (Warsaw, Poland). The conference was organized to present the state of the art and the research on SLI, exchange information and specialist knowledge, and strengthen international cooperation (download the poster).

 

 

 

14 May 2012 – The project poster was presented at the Sixth MC and WGs Meeting of Action ISO804: "Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment" (Berlin, Germany). The main objective of this Action is to profile bilingual Specific Language Impairment (SLI) by establishing a network to coordinate research on linguistic and cognitive abilities of bilingual children with SLI across different migrant communities (download the poster).

 

21–24 March 2012 – All the project partners participated in the project meeting in Tallinn, where they discussed the final stages of developing the on-line tasks and also made final decisions about the design and content of the printed games. The main organizational issues related to the final project conference in Kaunas were dealt with. The 2nd call for the conference was announced and circulated.

 

3–4 November 2011 – The project conference "Children in Multilingual Settings" [= „Vaikai daugiakalbėje aplinkoje”] was organized. The international conference was held in the coordinating institution (Vytautas Magnus University). The main objective of the conference was to present and discuss various aspects of child language in relation to multilingualism (download the conference programme).

 

 

30 September – 1 October 2011 – The project member Natalija Gagarina (ZAS, Berlin) presented FREPY in the round table meeting “Актуальные проблемы и перспективы развития русского языка в Германии” [= “Challenges and perspectives of learning Russian in Germany”]. The meeting was held in Frankfurt-am-Main (Germany).

 

24 September 2011 – The FREPY project was presented at the forum “Россия-Германия в научном диалоге. Партнерство идей” [= “The Scientific Dialogue and Cooperation of Russia and Germany”] in Berlin. The project member Natalija Gagarina gave a talk on the issues related to learning Russian in the multilingual context of Germany (‘Овладение русским языком в Германии: проблемы и перспективы онтолингвистики мультиязычия’).

 

14–17 September 2011 – A meeting of all the project partners was organized in Maribor, Slovenia. The main focus of the meeting was task evaluation of FREPY on-line games. A detailed presentation on the statistical results of pilot testing was made by the associated partner Maddalena Fiordelli from Lugano, Switzerland.

 


 

21 December 2010 – The FREPY project was presented at the seminar-discussion at Vytautas Magnus University “Child language in Lithuania: theory and practice” [= „Lietuvių vaikų kalbos raida: teorija ir praktika“]. Speech therapists, representatives of the Lithuanian Ministry of Education, psychologists and other specialists participated in the forum with their presentations on the current state of LI children in Lithuania and discussed the most urgent issues related to language impairments. The seminar reached some of the most important national educational institutions and some specialists in Kaunas and other Lithuanian cities. Different professionals from different educational institutions gave their presentations on the most urgent issues related to language impairments and their treatment in Lithuania.

 

18 December 2010 – The project was introduced on the Day of Projects in Tallinn University to students, university teachers, professionals and laypeople.

 

 

 

2–6 December 2010 – The third project meeting of all the project partners was organized in Berlin. The main issues that were discussed during the meeting included the interim results and project management.

 

 

 

11–12 June 2010 – A one-day workshop was organized by the partners from Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas. It was a workshop of all the Lithuanian partners, during which the concept of the FREPY tasks was discussed in detail together with the designers. Some suggestions were developed through group-work with a special focus on the development of different types of tasks.

 

12–15 May 2010 – The project team participated in a meeting in Tallinn. During the meeting, the partners discussed the project progress and project management. The discussion primarily focused on the development of sample tasks, wordlists, and the design of printed materials.

 

 

 

12 February 2010 – An additional meeting of the management committee was organized in Vienna to discuss tasks designs, deadlines, and project management; representatives of three partner countries were involved: Estonia, Germany, and Lithuania.

 

 

3–6 December 2009 – The kick-off meeting of all the project partners took place in Kaunas, Lithuania. The partners made needs analysis presentations, discussed the aims and objectives of the project, and agreed about the project organization, team structure, key roles and responsibilities.

 

 

FREPY leaflets and cards have been released! You can access their electronic versions here: leaflets, cards.

 

 

 

Online FREPY games have already been released!