Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Language Maintenance in the Diaspora in the Digital Era: Experience in Providing Virtual Language School

Sun, June 3, 2:00 to 3:30pm, History Corner (450 Serra Mall, Building 200), 107

Abstract

Necessity to maintain and keep the heritage language within members of diaspora, as well as long, very active, and fruitful cooperation between Latvia and Latvians in all over the world were main impulses for Latvian Language Agency to create the virtual Latvian language school (in 2016). This presentation will overview the first results of teaching and learning language in virtual space - focusing on the advantages and challenges of the use of technologies in learning process.
The first experience makes it possible to find pros and cons of digital schooling. This presentation will describe the digital tools used in online school, principles of creating a class, methodological approach, adaptation of curriculum to teaching opportunities offered by interactive lesson delivery system used in this particular online language school. Special attention should be given to language attitudes of family members as a strong support and enlarger of motivation for each student to participate language classes, as well as professional skills of teacher (special training and methodological support).
To achieve the goal of this school - to help maintain the heritage language - it is important to understand and to use all advantages of digital education, making possible to use the principle of virtual language school more widely in future (for instance, in preserving minority languages).

Short Bio

Gunta Kļava is a researcher at the Latvian Language Agency, PhD student in General Linguistics (University of Latvia). She is currently completing her dissertation about language and migration from the perspective of language policy. Her scientific interests are sociolinguistics, language policy, multilingualism, migration and language, etc. Since 2010 she has been involved in various projects including language teaching for different target groups.

Author