Background

ICT can be of great help when connected to objects of common, large-scale use like mobile devices.

Student mobility requires in fact innovative, creative, and at the same time simple, learning tools allowing for a quick comprehension of the cultural codes of the new place where the students happen to arrive and spend a study/training period.

ILOCALAPP, focusing on the concept of incidental learning, aims to merge these technologies to meet mobility students’ needs. By providing mobility students with language and cultural competences in a smart way, the ILOCALAPP project will enable them to integrate in and interact with the country hosting them.

The ILOCALAPP project is both innovative and complementary to other projects already carried out by the consortium. It is complementary since it capitalises on the experience of two previous LLP projects – E-LOCAL and elocALL- ; it is innovative because it wishes to catch up with the methodological and technological trends of the latest years and will produce a smart mobile tool for incidental learning of 4 languages and cultures (Finnish, Italian, Polish and Portuguese).

E-LOCAL (Electronically Learning Other Cultures And Languages) is a LLP/KA2 Multilateral Project which developed, between 2010 and 2102, online courses for 6 languages and cultures, four of which are addressed by ILOCALAPP too. It was awarded with the European Language Label by the Italian National Agency in 2012.

The project elocALL (E-LOCAL for all) is a LLP/KA2 Accompanying Measures Project which in 2013-2014 carried out large-scale actions of valorisation of the E-LOCAL project’s outputs and experimented on the tutor-based delivery of the E-LOCAL courses.

The main target of both projects were mobility students, who were provided with a fundamental instrument to get into the language and the culture of their country of destination, the E-LOCAL courses. These online courses are still in use in the institutions of the project consortium and are currently accessed by many incoming and outgoing students, not only belonging to the consortium itself.