December 2022: Lectură pentru mine. Știința în slujba copiilor – LEMI, winning project at A.F.C.N. I/2023, section Promoting Written Culture, and at INNOUNITA European Pitch Competition
In November, the results of the evaluation and selection process for cultural projects and programmes funded by the Ministry of Culture through the Administration of the National Cultural Fund (AFCN) were published. West University of Timisoara has won with the project called LEMI, designed to be a digital tool that makes kids love reading and submitted by the team coordinated by CS II dr. habil. Mădălina Chitez, from the Faculty of Letters, History and Theology. After a series of successful projects carried out within the university, focused on academic writing (and the compilation of learner or expert corpora), the research team is now turning to the pre-university environment. Thus, the aim of the LEMI project is to stimulate the interest in reading during the first individual and collective reading activities (grades 0-IV). Thus with LEMI, the first digital tool in Romania based on linguistic research methods will be created, offering automatic evaluation and recommendation of texts suitable for reading at different stages of the primary school cycle (recommendations based on grade or performance level in reading texts). This tool can be easily used by teachers, parents, designers of teaching materials, educational NGOs and producers/publishers of children’s literature.
The LEMI project is innovative from several perspectives: (a) cultural: by testing and implementing the new tool at the level of partner schools/organisations, children’s access to new forms of written culture will be immediate; (b) didactic: creating the first tool in Romania used by all promoters; (c) scientific: scientific testing and validation of the first method for assessing the complexity of school texts for Romanian; (d) societal: by developing, for the first time, a concept of technology transfer from the scientific to the educational area, in the field of early school reading, the strategic objective of popularising science is achieved.
LEMI’s partners will be Fundația Noi Orizonturi, No. 16 “Take Ionescu” Secondary School from Timișoara, Giarmata Secondary School, Cenei Secondary School.
The results of the AFCN funding session (after stage II) can be viewed here.
In December, a similar project, scaled up to the business level, was also presented at the internal INNOUNITA Common Training Entrepreneurship Programme competition and represented West University of Timisoara at the international competition (INNOUNITA European Pitch Competition) on 13 December 2022, winning one of the three prizes.
