Abstract:

The Finnish speaking university students have to pass exams in oral and written Swedish on medium level (CEFR B1/B2). This is a challenge for the Swedish teachers because the student’s level in Swedish in upper secondary school has declined rapidly in recent years and that can be noticed when they come to university.

From the perspective of a university teacher students with different kind of problems, for example learning disabilities, motivation problems and social problems, are a challenge. We realized that there is very little material for the students with learning challenges, and we wanted to create an open access web page with diverse exercises for them. The exercises are divided in four themes: business and economy, art, technology and sustainability. The students can choose the theme, the type or the a grammatical topic for the exercise.

The aim of the Soft svenska project is to use as much as possible audios, pictures, videos and animations so that different types of learners can choose an approach that feels comfortable, meaningful and fun when learning Swedish. We started by collecting information on the most common problems that our students have. Students with different kinds of learning challenges have been interviewed in order to find out what kind of exercises would benefit their learning. Students from Aalto University have also contributed in designing the web page concept.

The Soft svenska project started in March 2019 as an Aalto Online Learning project. The project is ongoing and will be completed in december 2019. The web page will be developed and updated even after the project ends, and it will serve many learners.

We collected feedback on the exercises from Aalto University students in the spring term 2019, and the results were promising. The response was only positive: the students were inspired by the exercises, because they covered their field specific issues, which they regarded as useful. In addition they commented that the visual approach and the audios in the exercises also helped them to memorize new words, phrases and structures. More detailed data on student satisfaction will be collected during the autumn 2019.

We noticed that the exercises were useful for various purposes during the basic course in Swedish, for example repetition, home work, support material and especially when differentiation in the classroom is needed. The Soft svenska web page provides new aspects to language learning and brings joy to studying Swedish.

Keywords:

Learning with pictures and audio, language learning, Swedish, higher education, online learning, learning disabilies, motivation.