Although research into language acquisition has yielded a significant amount of knowledge over the past fifty years, in practice, foreign language teaching methods are still used that, especially for adults and adolescents, fail to teach them to communicate fluently and confidently. The solution comes from the cooperation of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, and the Czech startup Mooveez, which owns the educational application of the same name. Together, they are developing a scientifically based method for learning foreign languages in adulthood, which they are implementing into the mobile application environment so that it can be used by people all over the world.
Kateřina Chládková works simultaneously at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, and at the Institute of Psychology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, where she heads the SPEAKin lab research laboratory. She and her team are one of the few in the world to research early language acquisition in newborns and link it with research on language learning in childhood and adulthood. “Our research, as well as data from other laboratories, shows that if an adult is given the right conditions, he or she can learn a foreign or second language in a similar way to how he or she learned his or her native language when he or she was a small child,” explains Kateřina Chládková.
Letting adults take a natural path to a new language has been the vision of the Mooveez app from the beginning. “Thanks to this collaboration, we have a unique method of natural language learning under our hands. Together, we put it together from the findings of scientific research and practical experience in language teaching,” adds Dr. Chládková enthusiastically. The method will be constantly tested and improved based on experiments in the laboratory, language classes and data analyses from the app. “I believe that the combination of science and business is the right way to achieve the development and especially the application of a new method.”
“We live in a turning point in terms of new fantastic possibilities for language learning. Thanks to the Internet, advanced mobile phones and artificial intelligence, we can literally relive our childhood, but in a new language and thus master the language effortlessly,” says the founder of Mooveez, which won the prestigious award for the World Digital Innovation of the Year awarded by the British Council in London a few years ago. “We want to make it much easier for people to learn languages and together shape a world in which people understand each other.”
“I am truly delighted to be working with Mooveez and look forward to its development. It is a great example of the direction in which the Faculty of Arts wants to expand its scope. The research results of Kateřina Chládková and her team are building something that has enormous potential to be truly useful – new and more effective ways of learning languages,” says Eva Lehečková, Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Charles University.
