New Methods for Teaching Nordic Languages

October 2024 in Tartu, Estonia

The network met for the first time, and all presented the syllabi of their respective institutions. We compared teaching materials and learning goals. We discussed the different challenges that we each face in teaching Scandinavian languages to students who already know a Scandinavian language as well as to those who are learning one for the first time. We also discussed how to best share our findings with other teachers in the Nordic countries, and agreed to aim for both an online learning tool as well as a possible anthology.

March 2025 in Bergen, Norway

September 2025 in Vilnius, Lithuania

In September 2025, our Nordplus project group met in Vilnius with the purpose of developing further the materials for our website. We explored the possibilities of using the University of Tartu's website as a host for the files we are producing and how this might be the optimal solution in order to avoid having to maintain algorithms over time. We also had thorough discussions about which aspects of each Scandinavian language were important for teaching their phonetics and developed a written layout of the website and which tab were to contain what kind of information for each language.

April 2026 in Tartu, Estonia

Our Nordplus project group met again in Tartu in April 2026. This time, we worked in a film studio and recorded three pilot videos on pronunciation in Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish. Much of our time during these days was spent developing and refining the scripts for the videos, but we also reviewed different types of exercises for the online resource we are making and discussed plans for our future collaboration.

June 2026 in Reykjavik, Iceland

After the conference in Bergen, the project group travelled together to Reykjavik for another network meeting. During these days, we focused primarily on planning and further developing the online resource on the pronunciation of the Scandinavian languages. We reviewed the pilot videos that we had recorded in Tartu in April and continued working on the scripts for the three videos on Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish pronunciation. These videos will be re-recorded when we meet again in Tartu in the autumn.

We also prepared scripts for several additional videos about the Scandinavian languages and discussed different exercise types as well as the overall structure of the online resource. In addition, we continued planning the project activities for the next academic year and agreed to meet again in Tartu in September to continue the practical work on the online resource.

September 2026 in Tartu, Estonia

In September, we met again in Tartu and enjoyed several productive and content-rich working days together.We began our meeting in the phonetics laboratory at the University of Tartu and also recorded further videos. In addition, we started to discuss the design and content of our open source web platform.

The project group organized a seminar on mutual intelligibility among the Scandinavian languages at the University of Tartu on April 30th 2026. The seminar was open to students and other interested participants, and attendance was excellent. Three invited scholars in the field, Ulla Börestam, Lise Horneman Hansen, and Hedvig Solbakken, gave engaging presentations on the teaching of neighbouring languages and Nordic mutual language comprehension. The seminar was also made available via Zoom for those who were interested but unable to attend in Tartu.

In June 2026, the project group met in Bergen to participate in the conference Nordand – Nordic Languages as Second Languages. This conference brings together second-language researchers from across the Nordic countries and lasted for three days. We presented a poster entitled “Hva? Hvad siger du? Materials for Teaching Neighbouring Language Comprehension in and beyond Scandinavia”, which gave us an opportunity to introduce our project to language researchers from around the Nordic region.

The conference enabled us to establish several new contacts that may become valuable for the project, and it also provided professional inspiration and new insights for the further development of the online resource.

Colleagues in the phonetics laboratory at the University of Tartu, assisted us in recording the pronunciation of Scandinavian vowels using electromagnetic articulography (EMA), with sensors attached to track physical movements of the tongue, lips, and jaw during speech.

We also recorded videos on the pronunciation of the Scandinavian languages in a film studio. These included videos focusing on Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish individually, as well as two chat-show style videos discussing similarities and differences among the Scandinavian languages.

In addition, we received training on how to design effective exercises for our online resource, which will be hosted by the University of Tartu. As part of our stay, we also had the opportunity to meet students of Scandinavian Studies at the university.