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Fabula

Fabula was an EC sponsored research and development programme as part of the Educational Multimedia Taskforce (1998-2000). It involved the following partners:

The University of Reading:
– Reading and Language Information Centre
– Department of Typography & Graphic Communication
The University of Brighton:
– School of Information Management
– IT Research Institute
DTP Workshop, Dublin
Institute for Applied Linguistics, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona
Institiúid Teangeolaíochta Éireann/Linguistic Institute of Ireland (ITE)
Gemeenshappelijk Centrum voor Onderwijsbegeleiding/ Centre for Educational Advice in Friesland
Kanboko Ikastola, France.

Resources from the Web site

The Fabula project developed a multimedia authoring tool for children and teachers which currently supports these language pairs:

Basque and French
Catalan and Spanish
Frisian and Dutch
Irish and English
Welsh and English.

You can download the free software kit and documentation from our Web site at www.fabula.eu.org.

The software kit lends itself to collaborative storymaking – not only within the classroom but also across the globe. The storybooks will travel via the Internet, so that children and teachers will benefit from sharing their stories (and experiences) with others in their own communities and beyond.

When children read Fabula storybooks, they interact with each page of the story through written words, pictures and sound, developing a greater awareness of the two languages by

exploring similarities and differences
building vocabulary
deepening grammatical understanding.

The audio support features of Fabula offer authentic practice in the sounds of the language, and help to make learning fun.

The findings of this project are reported in the following publications:

Edwards, V, Monaghan, F. & Knight, John (2002) Books, pictures and conversations: using bilingual multimedia storybooks to develop language awareness. Language Awareness 9: 135–46.

Edwards, V, Monaghan, F. & Hartley, T. (2000) Bilingual Multimedia: some challenges for teachers. Language, Culture and Curriculum 13(3): 264–78.

Monaghan, F. (2001) IT’s all talk? In P. Goodwin (ed.) The articulate classroom. London: David Fulton, pp. 77–82.

Edwards, V., Pemberton, L., Knight, J. & Monaghan, F. (2002) Fabula: a multimedia authoring environment for children exploring minority languages. Language Learning and Technology 6 (2)

For further information contact:

Professor Viv Edwards
National Centre for Language and Literacy
The University of Reading
Bulmershe Court
Earley
Reading RG6 1HY
Great Britain

Tel: 0118 931 8820
Email: V.K.Edwards@reading.ac.uk