Abstract:

The project GameLet – Gamified, media-based training of reading fluency (funded by Erasmus+ 2018-2021 and developed by researchers and teachers from Cyprus, Germany and Portugal), aims to develop a gamified, media-based, multilingual training program for reading fluency.

Its foundation is the Readers’ Theatre strategy (particularly the Multilingual Readers’ Theatre) and the background is the story of an audio play production. Groups of students participate in the development of content for GameLet as co-designers. The project follows the Design-Based Research methodology and a User-Centered approach.

Within this program, students are guided through a set of games and tasks (missions) designed to match the steps of the Multilingual Readers’ Theatre methodology. One of these steps implies the repeated reading of the passages. When compared with initial reading, this purposeful rereading of the script, which implies repetition and automatization, gradually helps students achieve greater fluency and accuracy, as well as deeper understanding of the text. However, whether in the native language or in a foreign language, error perception is not always easy for students and has to be trained. This requires cooperative learning, providing mutual support and feedback among the students in the group.

In this context, one of the tools developed is the Recording Studio. There, each student can individually practise his/her passages, resort to model reading, record the passages as many times as wanted or required by the teacher and then ask the other members of the group for feedback, which can be written or also recorded.

In the scope of the project this paper describes the updated version of the Recording Studio, providing a theoretical discussion on how this process and the tools provided could particularly benefit a student with a migrant background within a group of native speakers of the language in that specific country (L1). Connecting this student with a group of native speakers is particularly important as his/her peers can provide feedback on accent, pronunciation and intonation from a native speaker’s point of view. In the meantime, interaction and intercultural exchange among the students could be stimulated.

If the readers’ theatre script includes multiple language roles containing at least both languages (L1 of the country, migrant language), this may represent an even greater opportunity to enhance multilingualism, intercultural exchange and mutual learning, as this type of online tandem reading includes two groups of native speakers of different languages.

Keywords:

Reading Fluency, Readers’ Theatre, Language Learning, Feedback, Cooperative Learning, Game Design, Design Based Research, Migrant languages.