Abstract:

One of immigrants’ and refugees’ top priorities is acquiring a comprehensive knowledge of the local language of the country they are moving to. Through the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership “Language on the Go” (2019-1-NL01-KA204-060376) a free, gamified language-learning mobile app has been designed, developed (Android, IOS & web) and evaluated that helps refugees and immigrants to learn the local language and familiarize themselves with the new concepts around them. ‘Language on the Go” App constitutes a high-quality digital language learning application developed for refugees and immigrants that do not need previous linguistic education as they can navigate and translate the menus and vocabulary into their mother tongue. In the mobile application, 10 refugee languages were included: Arabic, Sorani, Punjabi, Somali, Tigrinya, Urdu, Albanian, Pashto, Farsi, Kurmanji, and 5 target languages: English, French, Dutch, Greek and Turkish. The results of the evaluation of the app by refugees and immigrants showed it was accepted very well and helped them to learn the local language of the country they are moving to.

Keywords:

Distance Learning, Refugees, Immigrants, Language on the Go, Mobile App.