The aim of the multidisciplinary project is to support the development of reading and spelling skills in the first three years of school. The digital game environment GraphoLearn will be further developed to support children’s learning for all learners independent of their learning skills. A key principle of GraphoLearn is to help learners to understand how written language units are connected to spoken language units. However, in the project we will develop the game further so that the emphasis is shifting from the form to the meaning, thus underlying right from the start that the aim of practicing reading skills is to retrieve meaning from written language. Research will be conducted both in Finland and in Switzerland. Three language versions of GraphoLearn will be developed: Finnish, English and German for Swiss learnes. The main aim is to provide support in learning to read in the first language, but here we also study whether children’s skills in English as a foreign language can be supported by the game now that formal instruction in foreign language starts in schools at Grade 1. Apart from a learning environment, GraphoLearn will include also skill assessments.
