PARLING: e-Literature for Supporting Children Learning English as a Second Language Ornella Mich
Elena Betta
Diego Giuliani
ITC – irst via Sommarive, 18 POVO, TN 38050 ITALY +39 0461 314582
ITC – irst via Sommarive, 18 POVO, TN 38050 ITALY +39 0461 314526
ITC – irst via Sommarive, 18 POVO, TN 38050 ITALY +39 0461 314556
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creating learning environments that extend the possibilities of traditional technologies such as books, blackboards, and linear one-way communication media (radio and television shows). In new environments students can learn by doing, receive feedback, refine their understanding and build new knowledge [2, 7]. They can also interact with the teacher and their peers by means of email and wireless technology, creating the collaborative context necessary to adequately learn a language.
ABSTRACT In this paper, we describe Parling, a multimedia system for supporting learning of English as a second language (L2). It is devoted to 8-11 year-old primary school children. The idea behind the system is that famous children’s literature offers the right motivating and low-anxiety context where users can improve their vocabulary and learn new language structures. The technological core of the system is a speech recognizer that allows implementing automatic pronunciation assessment. Parling is an adaptive system; it features a set of instructional games that change their vocabulary content dynamically based on the user’s learning needs. A preliminary usability test of the prototype system gave positive results.
Thematically-based bilingual programs are quite successful in language acquisition [4]. The children's own environment (family, school ...) are good sources of theme units, but in addition to these, children's literature offers an interesting medium for learning a new language. Thematic literature contains repetitive patterns that reinforce the user’s vocabulary and structures. Carefully chosen children’s literature allows children to develop their receptive language in an entertaining, meaningful context and naturally invites them to repeat many of the predictable words and sentences. Moreover, literature can provide a motivating and low-anxiety context for language learning. Literature provides background knowledge and cultural information [3]. Literaturebased, thematic, and content-based approaches in foreign language programs help teachers to build emotional, social, and intellectual responses to the natural language of engaging stories [8].
Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: interfaces - Graphical user interfaces (GUI), Voice I/O.
User
General Terms Human Factors.
Keywords Computer aided language learning, automatic children speech recognition, adaptive interfaces, learning by playing.
As research has demonstrated, reading aloud to children produces positive effects at any age. Jim Trelease, author of The ReadAloud Handbook [9], tells us that reading aloud to children “stimulates their interest, their emotional development, their imagination, and their language”. Language skills are fostered when children listen to the same stories over and over again until they develop an almost unconscious familiarity with literary elements and story structure. Their vocabulary grows larger by the story [1]. But reading aloud at school is a highly time-consuming activity; teachers cannot dedicate too much time to it. Systems like Parling can solve this problem. With Parling installed on their own computer at home, children can listen to the story as many times as they like.
1. INTRODUCTION The aim of this paper is to present Parling (Parla inglese - Speak English), a multimodal system designed to support learning of English as L2. Devoted to Italian children aged 8 to 11, Parling is based on famous children’s English literature. The user can choose from a list of well-know children’s stories, appropriate for her age and English level. She can listen to the story and read it, play entertaining games with individualized content, try word pronunciations and explore a pictorial dictionary. Learning a second language requires the student to learn to listen to, speak, read and write that language, often without exposure to it outside school. The new technologies provide opportunities for
Language learning is hard work. Effort is required at every moment and must be maintained over a long period of time. Games help and encourage many learners to sustain their interest and work. Through playing games, students can learn English the way children learn their mother tongue without being aware they are studying. Vocabulary acquisition is increasingly viewed as
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crucial to language acquisition. The use of games is considered highly important for presenting and revising vocabulary [5, 10]. For these reasons a lot of games have been inserted into Parling, which use only words coming from the story.
loaded, its corresponding audio is played back. There is also background music playing all the time. When the user clicks on one of the anchor words, an explanation window appears that explains the meaning of the words (see Figure 2). Then, by clicking the appropriate buttons the user can hear the pronunciation of the word and she can also try to utter the word herself. The system will respond with a message telling whether the word was pronounced correctly or not. For the moment, a simple binary response, i.e. an accepted/rejected response, is provided.
A brief description of the Parling structure will be given in the next section, followed by a presentation of the results of a preliminary test of the system, taken by a small group of primary school children. At the end, our future work will be presented.
2. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION The basic idea of Parling is learning a foreign language by reading classic works of that language’s literature. At the same time, Parling is based on the learning-by-playing paradigm. So there is a story as a leading thread, and several games aimed at helping students memorize the vocabulary of the story. A listen-and-repeat tool is always available to help the child to improve her comprehension and pronunciation. Automatic pronunciation assessment is implemented with a speech recognition engine developed in house. As acoustic characteristics of speech such as formant frequencies and duration depend on the age of the speaker, acoustic models of the speech recognizer were trained on a corpus of speech collected from 8 to 12 year old children. The vocabulary content of the games is targeted to the user expertise: it is dynamically built up with the words that the child didn’t know before finding them in the story. When the user, while reading the story, selects one of the active words to learn its meaning or to try its pronunciation, that word is immediately memorized by each system game and proposed the next time the user recalls that game.
Figure 2. Parling: a story page example and the explanation window A play! button allows the user to start a game, based on the words the child has activated during the story flowing. Currently there is one story available. The well-known Peter Pan has been chosen, because it is widely popular among Italian children, and so we think it is easy to understand even for a beginner English learner. Of course, this is a simplified and condensed version, about three hundred words long.
3. PRELIMINARY USABILITY TEST We organized a pilot usability study with a first Parling prototype. In this study we wanted to test three aspects: first, if children were interested in using the proposed system; second, the system usability; and finally, the software bugs. Three children 11 years old, two boys and a girl, selected from amongst the pupils of a fourth grade in a local primary school, participated in the experiment. Without any preliminary explanation, they tried Parling. As a first result, we noted that children did not consider the system boring: indeed they were concentrated during the entire test session and they were not distracted by the three observers; moreover, they would have liked to continue to use it even after the established time, 30 minutes. Two of the children listened sequentially to the entire story, activating the majority of anchor words, listening to the single word pronunciation and trying to utter it. After finishing the story, they went back and forth through it, listening again to some words and uttering them. We noticed that children were able to navigate through the story using the appropriate self-explanatory buttons.
Figure 1. Parling: the starting page and the visual dictionary At the beginning, Parling presents the user with a menu of stories to read, a list of games, and a box displaying the alphabet letters. The latter is the entry to a visual dictionary that the user can scroll through and look for the meaning of words (see Figure 1).
2.1 Back and forth through the story After choosing a story, the child can freely go back and forth through its pages by using a navigation bar. Each time a page is
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Observing children using the speech recognizer, we noted that more sophisticated and comprehensible feedback is necessary: when the child received a positive answer on his pronunciation after some negative answers, he did not understand what had changed in his pronunciation.
5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The efficacy and usability of the visual dictionary could not be tested as the dictionary was not yet implemented.
This work was partially financed by the European Commission under the project PF-STAR.
4. FUTURE WORK
6. REFERENCES
We are indebted to the English teacher Sergio Amadori for his effective collaboration and to the Villalagarina primary school for allowing the use of their structures for our experiment. Particular thanks to James Askham who is the English voice of Parling.
Speech recognition technology has a great potential for applications in the field of computer assisted language learning (CALL). In a preceding study [5] we found that the way of reporting the system response to the user on her pronunciation is really important. Teachers argued that the pronunciation assessment functionality of the system is really useful only if it is reliable and pertinent comprehensible feedback is given to the user. Being conscious that erroneous feedback has negative effects on the acquisition of L2 pronunciation [6], specific research will focus on effective ways of giving feedback on the pronunciation. Rather than an accepted/rejected response, we will investigate how to give indications on what was wrong with the utterance. This will imply also an improvement of our speech recognition technology. An animated agent could be useful in giving complex pronunciation hints.
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[2] Druin, A., and Solomon, C. Designing multimedia environments for children. John Wiley &Sons, Inc., 1996.
[3] Ghosn, I.K. ESL with children’s literature. The way whole language worked in one kindergarten class. Forum 35, 3 (July-September 1997).
[4] Gianelli, M. Thematic units: Creating an environment for learning. TESOL Journal 1, 1 (1991), 13-15.
[5] Giuliani, D., Mich, O. and Nardon, M. A study on the use of voice interactive system for teaching English to Italian children in Proceedings of ICALT 2003, 3rd IEEE Int. Conf. on Advanced Learning technologies (Athens, July 2003).
In order to make the application more appealing, more games will be designed. Furthermore, to allow the teacher to monitor the pupil’s home activity, a session logging functionality will be implemented.
[6] Neri, A., Cucchiarini, C., and Strik, H. Feedback in computer assisted pronunciation training: when technology meets pedagogy in Proceedings of CALL Conference “CALL professionals and the future of CALL research”, (Antwerp, Belgium, 2002), 179-188.
It is also our intention to measure the efficacy of Parling in the acquisition of English as L2. For this reason, a new version of Parling will be implemented in the near future that will run also on handheld computers. Using these easily portable and low-cost computers will allow us to test the system with two classes at a local primary school, because each child in one class will have a personal handheld device. The English teacher will use Parling as a support tool for integrating his teaching. In the other class, the teacher will give the same English notions, without the support of Parling. After an established period of time (two or three months), the children’s level of English knowledge in the two classes will be compared.
[7] Papert, S. Mindstorms. Children, computers, and powerful ideas. Perseus Books, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993.
[8] Smallwood, B. Thematic literature and curriculum for English language Learners in early childhood education. ERIC Digest (November 2002).
[9] Trelease, J. The Read-Aloud Handbook. Penguin USA, 1995.
[10] Uberman, A. The use of games for vocabulary presentation and revision. Forum 36, 1 (January-March 1998).
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