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The app was funded with 1.3 million euros by the Daimler and Benz Foundation as part of a long-term research project in partnership with Professor Stefanie Haberzettl from Saarland University.
The following text has been machine translated from the German with no human editing.
In the app, Wuschel – a somewhat clumsy dog – embarks on an adventure story lasting around 25 minutes, during which the child accompanies him. The child gives the app’s four-legged friend, who needs help, tips and instructions on how to overcome the difficulties he encounters. “In this way, we actually manage to create an authentic speaking situation and identify which language skills the child has and which they lack,” explains Stefanie Haberzettl, who helped develop the app as head of the Saarbrücken project site.
In the background, sophisticated technology analyses what is being said. “The child’s sentences are transcribed largely automatically and evaluated by a computational linguistics algorithm, so that a detailed language competence profile is created and it becomes clear whether the child needs targeted language support,” the specialist in German Language and Literature continues.
She emphasises that, by all accounts, playing with the clumsy, shaggy character seems to be more fun for the children than more traditional test formats, and can effectively encourage more introverted children or those with German as a second language – who are often unsure of themselves – to speak. “Furthermore, the app is, to some extent, ‘fairer’ than previous testing methods, as the algorithm does not take into account certain deviations from the linguistic norm that often occur among children with German as a second language or those whose first language is the Saarland dialect,” explains Stefanie Haberzettl. She gives an example: “Correctly marking the plural or choosing between the dative and accusative cases cannot be expected of a pre-school child who has only had a few years’ exposure to German as a second language, and is also of secondary importance for successful communication. With the WUSCHEL app, we can filter out such surface-level linguistic phenomena and instead determine the extent to which a child can skilfully use even their limited linguistic resources to communicate successfully,” says the researcher, highlighting another major advantage of the app.
The project ‘Assessing Language Proficiency in Children from Migrant Backgrounds’, funded with 1.3 million euros, got off the ground as early as 2014 as part of the ‘Ladenburger Kolleg’ funding programme run by the Daimler and Benz Foundation. In the years that followed, the interdisciplinary research team demonstrated that language proficiency assessment can be conducted in a valid, objective and fair manner, and developed the WUSCHEL app on this basis. In recent years, Prof. Haberzettl has already used it as a tool in the scientific monitoring of Saarland’s language-focused nursery schools. Using this play-based approach, around 2,000 pre-school children are to be assessed over the coming months as part of the pilot phase of the ‘Startklar Deutsch – alle Chancen für alle Kinder’ programme.
Further information about the app: https://wuschel-app.de
Contact:
Prof. Dr Stefanie Haberzettl
Tel.: (0681) 302-2937/-3559
Email: s.haberzettl(at)mx.uni-saarland.de
