Wordloca is an online Old English project designed to motivate students by providing an attractive and user-friendly resource that will inspire a creative and fulfilling engagement with language learning. It is the result of collaboration between young scholars in University College Cork and University College Dublin. The project is designed to improve students’ acquisition of language skills and provide training in core grammar within an attractive, user-friendly digital environment. It exploits the potential within digital media to bring together textual, material and audio-visual stimuli on a single page and to create networks and learning communities between and within the institutions involved. Over ten weeks, students are invited to translate texts across a number of genres whilst receiving exposure through image and sound to the historical, textual and material culture from which Old English emerged.

Using the findings of recent research into best teaching practice with ESL (English as a Second Language) and CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning), the Wordloca materials are designed to equip students with the skills to translate Old English to a high level of proficiency. Innovative technology and design have been utilised so that students view the material within a computer-simulated manuscript, the pages of which they can turn. The package includes intelligent feedback and interactive problem-based tasks that allow students to create a dynamic, user-specific product through which they can progress at their own individual pace. Language-learning strategies are carefully integrated with cultural content so that the meaningful practice of grammar structures is accompanied by stories of cultural-historical interest and images of the material culture that the Anglo-Saxons produced. Recordings of texts - introduced from week one so that students can see the ultimate goal – allow users to hear and read the voices of Anglo-Saxons as transmitted in their own words.

The Wordloca package is designed to be user-friendly and accessible whatever the level of the user’s language or computer skills. It utilises innovative technology but is produced in a format that is stable and transferable so that it can be used for independent study at home or within a more formal teaching environment. In addition to online resources, an accompanying handbook containing grammar explanations and supplementary exercises provides a comprehensive package which can be tailored to suit the requirements of a range of instructors and learners.