<b>Rethinking the SECI Cycle for Indigenous Language Learning: Urban Children’s Experiences with Digital Tools</b>

Frame by the SECI model (Socialization, Externalization, Combination, Internalization), the study documents children’s attempts to learn ancestral languages using digital tools across nine community-based sessions. Findings reveal a systematically broken knowledge creation cycle: intergenerational transmission has failed, children possess no tacit linguistic knowledge to externalize, digital tools produce errors due to lack of training data for low resource languages, and internalization cannot occur.

No automatic exact translation app exists for any child’s tribal language, search results were frequently inaccurate, public libraries contained no lesson about indigenous language writing books. When digital tools failed, children switched to English, a pattern theorized as “digital push” toward language shift. Student feedback confirms that all respondents’ agreed information was difficult to find on Google, and children reported learning more English vocabulary than tribal words during learning activities.