About the project

At the end of October 2018, the project Integration with mobiles was completed. The project has been a collaboration between researchers at the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology and has been co-financed by the Asyl, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF).

The purpose has been to investigate mobile learning and to develop an app for Arabic speaking newly arrived persons in Sweden. During the two years of the project, we have met close to 200 Arabic speaking persons and have conducted a number of field studies to find out about the language learning needs of the target group.

We have also investigated ways forward learning Swedish connected to different professions. Together with the research institute RISE Interactive we have organized design-based workshops where newly arrived persons and their teachers have been an active part of the design process.

Our studies show that there is a great interest among newly arrived Arabic speaking persons to use mobile phones more targeted as a way to learn Swedish and enter into the community. Many persons are already active daily users of mobile phones. Our results indicate that if an app supports the user’s everyday situations, it increases the motivation for using the app for language development.

The studies lead to the development of an app, Minclusion , which supports training of pronunciation and everyday phrases. The app contains texts, images, audio and video to create a variation for the user. The development has taken place in different stages, where we have involved users who have made suggestions and requests about the content. The app is available to download free to Android phones on Google Play.

The results of our work have been presented at various seminars, national as well as international conferences and have been published as conference contributions and scientific articles.