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AR Flashcards for Asian Language Learning
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This current study aimed at creating a 3D virtual environment on Second Life particularly for special education students to enhance their first language, Mandarin, learning in vocabulary and sentence structures. Four students aged between 8 and 9 participated in this research. In addition to their inherent disabilities (mild autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or mild mental retardation), all the four participants suffer from delayed language development. The purpose of the 3-month study was therefore to establish a platform enhancing their learning of Mandarin Chinese. A design-based qualitative design was adopted in this study. The collected data included in-class observation, video clips of learning process, and post-study interviews with the four disabled children. Additionally, parents' comments on their children's oral expression skills at home were also collected. Through a two-cycle investigation, this research proposed six categories of Human-computer interface (HCI) design principles for using virtual worlds to enhance special education students' Mandarin learning. In addition, both the interview results and the parents' comments confirmed the effects of using this platform for special education students' learning.
The relation between bilingualism and cognition is informative about the connection between language and mind. From the perspective of language, the question is how bilingualism might help or hinder cognition – narrowly interpreted here as executive function. From the perspective of higher cognition, the question is what kinds of experiences improve executive function. Reported cognitive benefits from bilingualism range from none to substantial as a function of age, type of bilingualism (e.g., life-long balanced vs later-onset or infrequent use of the other language), syntactic relation between the two languages, socio-economic and immigrant status, task, and laboratory. To understand the variability and inconsistencies in results with bilingualism, I analyze concepts of executive function and cognitive reserve and examine the range of factors (such as active video game playing, education, musical training, and aerobic exercise) that are known to correlate with or to improve executive function. I suggest that a) “executive function” is a complex set of cognitive processes, the components of which are sometimes minimally correlated with each other, depending on the task; b) bilingualism is inconsistently correlated with superior executive function and delayed onset of dementia; c) all speakers (mono- or bilingual) have non-linguistic ways of improving executive function; and d) benefits from bilingualism – and all cognitively challenging activities – are inconsistent because individuals vary in the number and kinds of experiences they have that promote superior executive function.
The use of two or more languages is common in most of the world. Yet, until recently, bilingualism was considered to be a complicating factor for language processing, cognition, and the brain. The past 20 years have witnessed an upsurge of research on bilingualism to examine language acquisition and processing, their cognitive and neural bases, and the consequences that bilingualism holds for cognition and the brain over the life span. Contrary to the view that bilingualism complicates the language system, this new research demonstrates that all of the languages that are known and used become part of the same language system. The interactions that arise when two languages are in play have consequences for the mind and the brain and, indeed, for language processing itself, but those consequences are not additive. Thus, bilingualism helps reveal the fundamental architecture and mechanisms of language processing that are otherwise hidden in monolingual speakers.
We conducted a fundamental user study to assess potential benefits of AR technology for immersive vocabulary learning. With the idea that AR systems will soon be able to label real-world objects in any language in real time, our within-subjects (N=52) lab-based study explores the effect of such an AR vocabulary prompter on participants learning nouns in an unfamiliar foreign language, compared to a traditional flashcard-based learning approach. Our results show that the immersive AR experience of learning with virtual labels on real-world objects is both more effective and more enjoyable for the majority of participants, compared to flashcards. Specifically, when participants learned through augmented reality, they scored significantly better on both same-day and 4-day delayed productive recall tests than when they learned using the flashcard method. We believe this result is an indication of the strong potential for language learning in augmented reality, particularly because of the improvement shown in sustained recall compared to the traditional approach.
Learning a second language is challenging. Becoming fluent requires learning contextual information about how language should be used as well as word meanings and grammar. The majority of existing language learning applications provide only thin context around content. In this paper, we present work in Crystallize, a language learning game that combines traditional learning approaches with a situated learning paradigm by integrating a spaced-repetition system within a language learning roleplaying game. To facilitate long-term engagement with the game, we added a new quest paradigm, "jobs," that allow a small amount of design effort to generate a large set of highly-scaffolded tasks that grow iteratively. A large-scale evaluation of the language learning game "in the wild" with a diverse set of 186 people revealed that the game was not only engaging players for extended amounts of time but that players learned an average of 8.7 words in an average of 40.5 minutes.
There are two important dimensions to successful second language learning: what goes on inside the classroom and what goes on outside of the classroom. While language teaching has always been seen as a preparation for out-of-class uses of language, much of the focus in language teaching in the past has typically been on classroom-based language learning. At the same time the limitations of classroom-based learning have been frequently acknowledged. The opportunities for learning or ‘affordances’ available in the classroom are hence quite restricted, consisting of a limited range of discourse and literacy practices. Today, however, the internet, technology and the media, and the use of English in face-to-face as well as virtual social networks provide greater opportunities for meaningful and authentic language use than are available in the classroom. In view of the growing range of opportunities and resources available to support out-of-class learning the paper examines what some of these opportunities are, how they are used, the kinds of learning affordances they provide, and the issues they raise for classroom based teaching as well as second language teacher education.