What is it about?
The Noplica language playhouse (www.noplica.nl) is developed to stimulate language development in children while children play, move and learn in an outdoor setting. In this paper we report the results of three experiments with one of the games (Energy Center) at three different locations (laboratory setting, daycare center in The Netherlands and orphanage in India). We tested children's vocabulary acquisition after children played on handbikes and listened to children's songs. We showed that children love to play and learn new words while playing. When children do not know each other (laboratory setting) the learning effect is minimal.
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Why is it important?
Today's children sit more and move and play less than ever before. The Noplica language playhouse is an attempt to stimulate language learning but in a playful way, it is unsupervised (children play when they want) and is a social activity.
Perspectives
Soon, the first Noplica playhouse will be installed in India, where we hope to be able to investigate how the games work in a disadvantaged population. We hope to place more language playhouses at locations where children lack appropriate language input to help them learn the language they need. Currently, this language playhouse is developed for Dutch and English.
Paula Fikkert
Radboud Universiteit
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Learning words in a second language while cycling and listening to children’s songs: The Noplica Energy Center, International Journal of Music in Early Childhood, July 2020, Intellect,
DOI: 10.1386/ijmec_00014_1.
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