Why should learning a language engage all five senses?

As children, we learn language by tasting new foods, playing games, imitation, and making sense of the world. Language and culture arrived together. So why do we often teach foreign languages as though they exist separately from the cultures that give them meaning?

Emeritus Professor Paul Seedhouse has spent decades exploring a different approach. Here, he writes about the importance of the cultural-language connection, and where we might go from here.

Contents:

1. Language and culture: a holistic relationship
2. Why do we learn foreign languages?
3. The benefits of using technology
4. Engaging the senses in language-learning
5. ‘Real-world digital’
6. What is the ‘cultural task’?
7. Helping children to experience the world
8. Visualising learning through extended realities

Language and culture: a holistic relationship

As infants we all learn our first language and culture simultaneously, with one reinforcing the other. While teaching foreign languages in the 1980s, I found it strange that we compartmentalised the teaching of foreign languages and cultures, as traditionally they have been taught and learnt separately.

The problem with teaching a foreign culture as an academic subject is that it is generally a static presentation of facts (or stereotypes) and figures, rather than an immersive, lived experience.

The problem with teaching a foreign language as an academic subject is that it generally a rehearsal for real life, which primarily focuses on putting words together in the correct order. When we learn our first language and culture, by contrast, we do so while living our lives through social interaction.

Why do we learn foreign languages?

What might be the possibilities for linking the learning of foreign languages and cultures as lived experience? The research on motivation suggests strongly that people learn languages more effectively if they feel motivated.

When I was 14 and at school, my choice of specialisation came down to two options, languages and sciences, and in the end, it was a very specific cultural interest which decided for me. The image of sciences at the time was ‘men in white coats’, but in my school library I read in ‘Paris Match’ all about Brigitte Bardot’s life in St Tropez, so science stood no chance.

Many people are motivated to learn a language because of something in the target culture they find engaging.

Later, when I taught French and German to British adult learners, I found that they were usually far more interested in gaining access to aspects of the culture, such as food, drink, cinema, music, festivals, and art, than the language itself.

Learning through cultural activities has been shown to enhance language acquisition.

The benefits of using technology

When I started working with computers in the 1980s, I wondered if one day it might be possible to find a way of learning foreign languages and cultures simultaneously and in an immersive way, far more similar to how we learn as children.

At first, the technology favoured a mechanical rather than experiential style of teaching and learning. However, in the 2000s, digital sensor technology began to offer a way forward and six generations of digital technology were developed at Newcastle University. I saw that computing scientists had built what they called the ‘Ambient Kitchen’ to help people with dementia cook to live independently and for themselves and asked them if we could work together to repurpose it for learning foreign languages while cooking, the universal cultural task of mankind.

Linguists and computing scientists set up a collaborative lab called ilab:learn and worked on three generations of technology resulting in: ‘The French Digital Kitchen’ and ‘The European Digital Kitchen’ (using digital sensor technology for activity recognition) and the ‘Linguacuisine’ app. These demonstrated that you can learn language and culture simultaneously whilst cooking in a stimulating multimodal, multisensory environment and have a tasty end product. Basically, having your cake and eating it!

We then took the concept further with the ENACT app and project, which creates an inspiring cultural environment for learners to work in.

ENACT goes beyond Linguacuisine by including any and every type of cultural task from any and every culture and language in the world.

ENACT is a free-to-use web app that helps people learn languages and overcome cultural barriers. Learners produce a cultural object or deliver a performance which ‘enacts’ the culture and language.

Engaging the senses in language-learning

While task-based language learning has been around for a few decades, this has generally been limited to tasks in the classroom or online which rehearse using the language, rather than actually using the language to carry out real-world cultural activities.

In ‘ENACT’, languages are learnt by physically carrying out a cultural task which can engage all of the five senses. Our research has shown that people learn foreign words better when they are physically touching items and using them to produce something culturally meaningful. Just think how the senses of smell and taste are important when making Turkish coffee!

By activating all senses at the same time in a meaningful multimodal experience, learners are able to maximise the number of synaptic connections and the likelihood of retaining the new word.

This is digital technology aimed to help learners engage more intensely and memorably with learning during real-world activities, rather than always taking them away from the here and now into online worlds.

A problem with digital learning of languages is that it has tended to be online, with the attention taken away from physical action and the senses towards a virtual reality where full sensory motivation is missing. Many people are currently learning languages online and using apps such as Duolingo, with exercises based on grammar and vocabulary where culture is absent, although there may be supplementary cultural files. Here the main in-built motivation for learners to progress seems to be to avoid being harassed by an owl.

Full sensory experiences that connect language to culture help develop new synaptic connections.

‘Real-world digital’

Let me tell you how this worked for me when I was in Italy about 12 years ago and learning to cook an Italian dish using our Linguacuisine app. I had to tenderise the meat using a mallet which the system told me was called a ‘batticarne’ which literally means ‘beat meat’! The combination of the senses – the touch of the pounding motion, the aroma, the beating sound, the sight of the yielding meat and the final taste – meant that the new word ‘batticarne’ became immovably lodged in my memory, reinforced by multiple synaptic connections.

We can think of this approach as ‘real-world digital’. The system is pedagogically designed to help participants’ language learning and to facilitate performance of the task at the same time. Participants can receive language support from the system and practice the language with their partner while physically manipulating real-world objects to complete the task.

The approach attempts to maximise the benefits of digital technology, namely making the cultural and linguistic heritages of all humankind available to all for free. However, we want to bring the cultures and languages to life for people through their actions and senses as lived experiences, rather than viewed at a distance in virtual reality.

The rich real-world digital environment created by ‘ENACT’ provides a range of possible supports to cater for a variety of learning styles and proficiency levels, which users can adapt to their own interests and learning styles. For example, we found that some learners decided to test each other on the vocabulary they were learning, even though no-one had suggested that they should do this.

What is the ‘cultural task’?

The ‘real-world digital’ environment is then an unusual hybrid of hi-tec and the primal and ancient. The hi-tec element means we can let anyone with an internet connection have access to the shared human heritage, but we can all try the same physical cultural experiences as our distant ancestors had (such as pounding grains), and relating these to language at the same time.

Our concept of the ‘cultural task’ extends the existing concept of the pedagogical task by covering the teaching and learning of culture at the same time as language. We call this the concept of the ‘cultural task’ for digital language learning.

It’s also the title of our new book, which tackles the problem of the transitory nature of projects and technologies by developing the ‘cultural task’ as an enduring concept which can be easily adapted to future projects and technologies. The book provides practical frameworks for designing tech that incorporates cultural tasks, and researching the learning of culture and language which takes place through their use. Globally, according to Google Analytics recent figures (up to mid-2026), the ENACT web app has been used by over 53,600 users across 153 countries, and has over 150 cultural activities in 32 languages.

Helping children to experience the world

This physical action-based approach to learning is of course ideal for children of all ages, who love learning by doing.

Approaches such as ‘Total Physical Response’, referring to the learning system whereby children absorb language sounds and patterns long before they learn to speak themselves, are popular around the world. For the last few years, we have been running ‘Around the World Clubs’ through the ENACT app, firstly in north-east England, then the rest of the UK, and recently internationally. They normally run as lunchtime or after-school clubs and cover a different language and culture each week, so children go ‘around the world’ as they learn.

Many schools have recently seen large increases in refugee and migrant children, and experienced integration problems. The ‘Around the World Club’ aims to enable social, emotional and cultural integration of children from all backgrounds by actively learning world cultures, activities and languages using the ENACT web app. Many activities produce a craft item which children can take home, while some produce food which they can eat. Children find it great fun, a real-world, gritty learning experience involving all their senses in the course of producing something with their hands and bodies.

“The teachers love it. Children love it. I love it. They are learning without even knowing it.” – Volunteer ‘Around the World Club’ organiser

In summary, the cultural task concept and technology not only support learning of languages and cultures but also foster digital skills, intercultural understanding, and social integration. Users are empowered to create and share cultural tasks in their own languages, enriching the platform’s repository.

Research studies show that learners achieve significant vocabulary gains and task completion, even in novel contexts. Participants described the process as engaging and empowering, emphasizing the importance of hands-on, real-world experiences combined with digital inputs.

However, engaging physically with another culture in this way does not always result in appreciation and acceptance! I once had a group of British schoolchildren visit our digital kitchen to learn Spanish while making dátiles con queso, dates stuffed with cream cheese and almond flakes. All the children successfully made them and produced the new vocabulary adequately. When we all sat down to eat the delicious tapas, one boy shouted: “Urgh I’m not eating that – it looks like a cockroach!” Then of course the other children also refused to eat them….

ENACT image - UK primary school children learning Chinese through calligraphy.

Visualising learning through extended realities

Our latest frontier is a new Horizon Europe research project, led by Dr Müge Satar, Professor of Applied Linguistics and Technology at Newcastle University.

Running from 2026 to 2030, LIL-ECHOES, or Living Cultural Labs: Empowering Communities Through Intercultural Encounters in Virtual Worlds, brings together 16 partners from eight countries. ENACT showed us how digital technology can support cultural experiences in the real world. With LIL-ECHOES, we will explore, as more of our lives move into virtual worlds, how we can ready these spaces for meaningful encounters with other people and cultures.

An important word in this project is ‘living’. We want to find out what happens when people share and negotiate culture together through immersive technology in person, in digital environments or in mixed reality. Can these encounters help us understand different perspectives, feel a greater sense of belonging and form new connections? And what might be lost when cultural experiences become virtual or mixed?

At the heart of the project will be Living Cultural Labs in museums and libraries in the UK, Germany, Greece and Italy. Within these user-centred, collaborative spaces, we will engage with migrants, older people, and young adults to help us create immersive experiences drawing on their own languages, memories, stories and cultural practices. Imagine meeting someone from another country in a shared virtual and extended reality environment, sharing an activity you used to do with your family in a 360-degree video, or stepping into a story based on somebody else’s memories.

We will explore these possibilities using extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI), combining immersive experiences with conversations and hands-on cultural activities. The second example builds directly on our work with ENACT. In our second use case, Living Culture 360, community members will create immersive videos of their cultural activities, allowing others to experience these practices from their perspective by creating AI avatars, and, importantly, have a go at hands-on activities themselves.

Just as with ENACT, we want people to learn cultural activities and languages by actually doing it.

We will work with communities to develop inclusive, ethical ways of using XR and AI. The aim is not to replace the smell of Turkish coffee or the feel of wearing and dancing with a mask, but to create new opportunities for people to meet, experience and share cultures across distances and generations.

You might also like…

• find out more about the ENACT app and how it works
• explore the work of the author of this blog, Emeritus Professor Paul Seedhouse (Human Spoken Interaction)
• discover the work of Dr Müge Satar, Professor of Applied Linguistics and Technology at Newcastle University’s School of Education, Communication, and Language Sciences
• find out more about Professor Paul Seedhouse’s and Dr Müge Satar’s new release: ‘Cultural Tasks for Digital Language Learning’, published by Bloomsbury
• find out more about LIL-ECHOES and how it combines extended realities and artificial intelligence to virtualise cultural life and reshape human communication
• read more from Emeritus Professor Paul Seedhouse: The interaction Engine: how do babies communicate before language?