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Weekly UpdatesABSTRACT
Fabula, an interdisciplinary project funded by the EU Multimedia Software programme, provides software to enable children learning European minority languages to create bilingual digital books. We share a set of assumptions and approaches to the key issues addressed by the project. First, bilingual books are a powerful teaching tool of great value in multilingual classrooms. Second, the graphic design of books has important effects in finding inventive solutions to problems. Third, multimedia can enrich bilingual books. Finally, self-made materials motivate children. These assumptions led to a general definition of the Fabula software: an easy-to-use software environment for making and viewing interactive multimedia bilingual books, concentrating on "languages of lesser diffusion." The language pairs we currently cater for are Welsh/English, Irish/English, Basque/French, Catalan/Spanish and Frisian/Dutch. We shall present a brief description of the Fabula software and discuss the ways in which it has been used in schools in Europe. We shall also set out our future plans for Fabula, including a Europe-wide competition for schools and the creation of a WWW-based "on-line library" for teachers and children who use the Fabula software.
INTRODUCTION
Minority languages suffer from a dearth of electronic media suitable for children, whether for language learning or for general use. The market for multimedia products in minority languages rarely justifies the outlay required from developers and publishers. However, the availability of electronic media can be a powerful motivator for young people in particular, to develop and maintain their knowledge of a minority language which might otherwise be overshadowed by more glamorous media products in the more widely used languages.
Fabula is a multidisciplinary, multinational project, initially funded by the European Commission, which goes some way to repairing this lack. In its two-year development phase, it involved teachers, children, software engineers, information designers and translators, together with academic researchers in linguistics, education, human-computer interaction and typography. Partners in England, the Basque country, Catalunia, Friesland, Ireland, and Wales set out to produce a simple-to-use tool for making bilingual multimedia story books in the lesser used languages of Europe. The aims were twofold: to help ensure that minority languages were not excluded from the Information Age and to increase the perceived status of lesser-used languages by associating them with new technologies.
This paper offers a brief description of the development and evaluation of the Fabula software and the ways in which it has been used in schools in Europe. We also set out our future plans for Fabula, including a virtual library of multimedia books for speakers and learners of minority languages.
Assumptions of the Fabula Project
The partners in the Fabula project shared a set of assumptions and approaches to the key issues addressed by the project. To begin with, we had a shared belief that bilingual books can be a powerful teaching tool. At a pragmatic level, those of the team experienced in language teaching in the UK context had long been convinced of the value of (paper-based) bilingual books for strengthening the position of minority languages. They had recently published a book of design guidelines for teachers thinking of using such books in the classroom (Edwards & Walker, 1995). Although the language learning setting in some of the other partners' regions was rather different, with an emphasis on foregrounding the minority language in a monolingual school setting, teachers in each region were open to experimenting with this new tool.
We also believed that the graphic design of books, paper or electronic, has important effects. Designers of paper-based books have struggled to find inventive solutions to problems such as how to position text in both languages on a page without suggesting that one is more important than the other. These details are noted by children given bilingual books as educational material, and influence their attitude towards the languages in question, often negatively. Enabling children to create products that are aesthetically pleasing is an important goal.
We shared the view that multimedia can enrich bilingual books. The specific stimulus for the project was the belief that creating digital versions of bilingual books can at once enrich the books by adding audio and other interactive elements and also solve some of the design problems connected with the paper medium. In addition, and importantly, digital books will give minority languages the high status attached to computer-based material and give children enjoyable, engaging language learning/exploration tools.
Finally, we believed that self-made materials motivate children. Some of the most successful of the paper bilingual books had been created by the children themselves, illustrating the constructionist approach to teaching, which holds broadly that creating an artefact is a more powerful way of learning than consuming another's product (Drain & Solomon, 1996; Jonassen, Peck, Wilson, & Pfeiffer, 1998). The active involvement of the children as collaborative creators rather than consumers is central to the successful use of the software in classrooms. An important practical spin-off is that these projects produce minority language materials for use in other teaching situations.
These assumptions led to a general definition of the Fabula software: an easy-to-use software environment for making and viewing interactive multimedia bilingual books, concentrating on European "languages of lesser diffusion." The language pairs used in the development phase were Welsh/English, Irish/English, Basque/French, Catalan/Spanish and Friesian/Dutch. The software consists of two integrated components: a simple multimedia authoring environment (the Fabula Maker) enabling users to create pages of text and graphics, plus interactive elements; and a browser-like environment (Fabula Reader) for reading and interacting with the products of the Fabula Maker.
The Fabula Software
In the development phase, the project had two main objectives. The first was to develop a tool sufficiently usable and flexible to meet the needs of teachers and children producing their own bilingual multimedia materials in a range of different settings. Several multimedia applications were already available and were considered for use: high-end professional programs like Macromedia Authorware and Director can be found alongside others such as the Learning Company's KidPixor StoryBook Weaver, which are more likely to be available on a school budget. However, the more sophisticated programs require relatively advanced technical and design skills to create a reasonable result. The lower-end products, while easy and fun to use, tend to encourage the use of prepared graphic and audio material with an unmistakably U.S. flavour. In addition, localised versions of whatever software we produced would be essential, and while authoring packages exist in the major languages, the lesser used languages were not well catered for, and the code of the packages would not have been available to us for localisation. In contrast, we envisaged Fabula as an easy to use tool which would draw on the principles of best practice for screen based learning materials and be designed specifically to meet the needs of bilingual children and teachers in a number of different countries. This objective has now been achieved: the authoring and browsing tools are currently available in the project languages on CD-ROM (for schools which are not yet online) and can also be downloaded free of charge from the Fabula Web site: www.fabula.eu.org.
The early thinking on the project assumed a scenario in which an adult professional -- likely to be a teacher or a translator, or possibly a commercial publisher -- would create a second language version of a pre-existing monolingual text for display in the Fabula Reader. Alternatively, we thought the teacher might take an existing bilingual electronic book in one pair of languages and substitute her own language version for either one or both original languages. The bilingual product would then be given to the children. The team's thinking on this point evolved, however, and the scenario we worked toward was of children being involved in creating bilingual storybooks, probably from scratch, using their own graphic material. This assigns children a more active role and is in line with current best practice in bilingual classrooms.
The decision to target children as users of the Fabula Maker as well as the Reader meant that it had to be straightforward and simple to use. Maker is used to assemble multimedia objects, acquired for instance from a scanner, digital camera, or audio CD, into an electronic book. We have not attempted to build in media editing facilities (word processor, drawing package, sound editor) as these are available relatively easily elsewhere. There are two screen areas for text, one for each language, to be assigned as the user chooses. Users can add various types of interactivity, such as in the form of links from the picture to media objects such as sound files (containing spoken dialogue fragments or recorded sound effects), labels, or speech and thought bubbles (containing text). In addition, users can place links between a word or phrase of one language and its equivalent in the other to create a kind of simple guessing game for any child reading it. Links can also be made from individual words to a bilingual glossary for the book. If a spoken version of the entire text in a text panel has been recorded, this can be linked in via a special button on the relevant text panel (Figure 1).
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