Supporting Cultural Immersion of Foreign Individuals

Between 2007 and 2009 around 60.000 immigrants were coming to Denmark each year (Grunnet 2010). The main integration activities for these new citizens are language courses run by the communities, which are offered free of charge or with a minimal fee. The goal of these courses is to put the new comers into a position, where they can participate in everyday Danish life. But although the courses establish a thorough theoretical understanding of the language, they often lack the possibilities to motivate the students in their everyday activities to apply this knowledge in real cultural settings and thus to pro-actively participate in their host society.

To cope with this applicability problem, we suggest an approach based on our previous work on intercultural communication (e.g. Rehm et al. 2009) that puts the cultural and language learning task in the context of its actual use by embracing new and innovative training methods – like situated and experience-based learning – that have been shown to be more effective in terms of cultural integration (Landis et al 2004). Imagine e.g. a situation where the student stands in line at the train station in order to purchase a ticket. This can be seen as an ideal situation to trigger a Danish learning session on buying a train ticket. The student has some time for this session as he is waiting for his turn, he is in the right context for the knowledge that is conveyed and he is able to apply the knowledge shortly afterwards in a real situation.

On a theoretical level, SCIFI aims at an integrated model of cultural interactions by taking the system and user perspective into account. This is based on our previous experience with culture aware interactive technology and mobile embodied interactions and will pave the way for learning activities that are integrated into the student’s everyday activities.

On a practical level, we develop a mobile solution for smart phones that proposes Danish multimedia exercises to the student based on an interpretation of the student’s context at that time and taking the student’s background in terms of language expertise, cultural integration and learning preferences into account.