Innovation in Language Learning

On a mission from the Norwegian government, a multidisciplinary project team in Uni Research has been working on developing the Norwegian version of the originally Swedish dictionary series LEXIN since 1996. Today the Norwegian project is owned and funded by The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training. In 2008 the LEXIN project team was awarded The Rosing Language Price from The Norwegian Computer Society in cooperation with The Language Council of Norway.

The LEXIN dictionaries are customized for non-native speakers who have limited proficiency in the Norwegian language and who may also be unfamiliar with the use of dictionaries as such. The dictionaries are illustrated and user friendly, and all content, design and user interface are developed with this target group in mind. Since the first dictionary launch in 2002 the end users have been able to contact the project team directly through the project's website. This dialogue has proven to be of great value. User surveys have also contributed to our knowledge about the end user needs and habits, and how they benefit from using LEXIN.

A speech synthesis with adjustable reading speed for all the Norwegian dictionary content was implemented in 2011, and the full text search solution implemented in 2010 enables the end users to search in the entire Norwegian dictionary content, and no longer merely the entry words. All dictionaries are published online, and some of them also in printed editions: <www.udir.no/lexin>.

Online editions are free.

The Norwegian series consists of dictionaries with one of the two Norwegian official written standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk, as source languages and the following as target languages: Arabic, Burmese, Dari, English, Kurdish Kurmanji, Kurdish Sorani, Lithuanian, Persian (Farsi), Polish, Russian, Somali, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Tigrinya, Turkish, Urdu and Vietnamese. At present we are developing a technical solution allowing dictionary searches also the opposite way, making today's target languages also function as source languages for searches to Norwegian Bokmål and Nynorsk.

 

Keywords: Dictionaries, Language learning, Language teaching, Minority language, Pupils, Immigrants