Digital Empowerment in Language Teaching (DELTEA)

Dear colleague

Testing a phonics app: September 2024-March 2025

We’re researchers from the Universities of Southampton and Reading.  We’re inviting teachers working with NCLE to join a classroom intervention to test the effectiveness of our French and Spanish phonics app.

What’s the intervention about?

The app has been designed to teach foreign language (FL) sounds along with their corresponding letters.  It uses Artificial Intelligence and specialist, ground-breaking software to give learners targeted feedback and a score every time a learner pronounces a word. The app has seven levels or lessons which focus on specific sounds and their spellings.  There are tasks inbuilt in each level to practise sounds, word pronunciation, sound spelling links and contrastive work with English sounds.

We want to find out whether targeted phonics instruction improves phonological decoding (reading aloud).  We would also like to explore how learners in primary and secondary schools learn new FL sounds and whether they successfully adapt sounds which are similar across languages to better reflect the FL.  

What will I need to do?

To do this, we need to conduct an experiment and we’re looking for 24 schools to join us.  Everyone will have access to the app but at different times.  Your children will need regular, in class access to tablets (either IoS or Android) and you’ll need to spend around 10-15 minutes per week on each app level (lesson).  Each learner will need to spend around 10 minutes on pre- and then post-tasks.

In the first phase, 12 “intervention” schools (4 secondaries and 8 primaries) will work with the app whilst 12 “control” schools (4 secondaries and 8 primaries) will continue with their usual FL classes.  During the second phase the roles will switch and the “intervention schools” will continue with their usual classes whilst the “control” schools will access the app.  We’ve set out some proposed dates and tasks in the table. Group A will do the post-tasks twice so we can measure durability of learning.

What to do next?

If you’d like to join the experiment, please fill in this registration form.  We will be in touch with you to arrange ethics approval with your Headteacher and the children’s parents who can choose to opt out of the study.

Thanks for your time reading this letter! Please click DELTEA to find out more about our project.

Alison Porter and Suzanne Graham