2011 International Conference on Asian Language Processing
Games for Academic Vocabulary Learning Through a Virtual Environment Kiran Pala1, Anil Kumar Singh2 and Suryakanth V Gangashetty1 1
International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India 2 Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, Bhubaneswar, India E-mail: {kiranap, aiklavya}@gmail.com,
[email protected] language experiences of learners using computer technology. In recent years, vocabulary has not received the recognition it deserves in academics. It is also characterized by neglect in terms of quantity. A vast amount of teaching time is consumed by explanation and definition. Classroom blackboards are often littered with masses of new lexical items, and students compile pages after pages of vocabulary word lists that they rarely have the opportunity to practice. In reality, vocabulary seems to arise in the classroom regardless of the chosen activity and unrelated to any conscious design on the teacher̉s part. In such a situation, classroom teaching does not promote natural learning or any significant additional learning. For learning to be natural, we should have a model based on what is useful and appropriate in the input. This situation of the vocabulary arising incidentally in academic materials is obviously not desirable. We cannot leave lexis to take care of itself and assume that the learners will acquire the vocabulary that best suits their needs. However, in a classroom with limited time available, conflict among learners' interests and the constraints imposed by syllabus demands causes a challenge for the teachers and gives us an opportunity to devise better learning environments. In organizing academic vocabulary learning, we have to select vocabulary carefully to ensure that high priority items are included and we have to provide varied opportunities for practice to compensate for the lack of repeated exposure available to the “learner”. The aim of this paper is to present suggestions in this direction. We present an architecture (for building games for learning) that we have used.
Abstract— This paper describes the challenges faced in language learning and use, with a focus on domain-specific vocabulary learning. We focus on the architecture and the presentation model of domain-specific knowledge components. The paper first discusses the significance of assistive mechanisms for vocabulary learning in an academic domain and then outlines two architectures for the presentation model. We suggest how the design of this environment for vocabulary use and learning in the academic domain must adopt different presentations and search strategies to confront the specific challenges in the domain. As this problem can only be solved on a long term basis, we also briefly describe a set of games as a first step in the implementation of the assistive mechanisms. Keywords- Academic vocabulary; Virtual environment, Content representation; Explicit learning; Architecture; Assistive mechanism; Games for learning;
I.
INTRODUCTION
The arrival of technologies that provide a variety of media connecting students to teachers, peers and learning materials, online learning has become a new way of reaching students and connecting them with one another. Today’s instructional models have to address the complexities of online learning environments, meeting the needs of students and teachers to learn and teach in an effective way. Online learning also places new demands on them to rediscover and redefine learning and teaching practices. In view of the Indian conditions (where multilingualism, or at least bilingualism, is unavoidable), utilization of computer and Internet technology, especially in the field of education is still in the initial stages. In exploring the potential use of technologies as a medium for learning, authors and academics have looked at the challenges for students and teachers. In the era of inter- and multi-disciplinary educational environments, we have students from various domains learning or working together. In academics, whenever students make a shift from one domain to another, they experience new words (technical terminology/jargon) of the respective domain. For instance, science preundergraduate students switching to field technology will face new words related to field technology. Virtually all theories about this are concerned with the role of linguistic input or the environment and therefore technology needs to take these into account [3]. Computer technology provides learners with new and varied options for language learning through interactive tasks, delivered through CD-ROMs, web pages and communications software on the Internet. Researchers need to reconsider any approach to language learning (and use) which is concerned with explaining how language development is prompted by exposure to the target language in view of the dramatic differences in
978-0-7695-4554-7/11 $26.00 © 2011 IEEE DOI 10.1109/IALP.2011.67
II.
THE NEED FOR VOCABULARY
A large body of research confirms that vocabulary knowledge is positively co-related to a student’s ability to comprehend text. If the difficulty of words increases in the text, understanding (meaning and usage of words) of the text will decrease, i.e., understanding of the individual words (terminology/jargon) is directly related to the comprehension of text passages, lectures and conversations for people in a particular academic domain [8]. In general, the overall academic achievements and communicative capability are highly influenced by vocabulary knowledge [8]. For instance, consider vocabulary’s impact on academic achievement. Take a 12th-grade science student’s (rural Indian conditions, a case of Telugu language) prospect for successful learning when s/he does not know the new terms (not about the sentence constructions and grammar of the language) AnDakosamu (gynoecium) and peetabhagamu (receptacle). If the instructor addressing the same gradelevel life-science content says the following: “pushpalalo, 295
anDakosamu peetabhagamu nundi erpadunu” (In flowers, the gynoecium starts from the receptacle). A narrow understanding of the word anDakosam (gynoecium) based on the knowledge of the words (anDa or egg and kosamu or bank/treasury/ collection) might lead to misunderstanding of the term as used in this context. To take another example from a different domain, consider the following Hindi sentence: “eka vAkya jismeM karmavAcaka kriyA ho, sAmAnyatah karthA Ora karma donoM hote heM” (A sentence in which a transitive verb occurs, usually has both a karta and a karma). Here the term ‘karma’ (roughly ‘object’, whereas ‘karta’ is roughly ‘subject’) has a very different meaning from the usual meaning of the word in Hindi, which is ‘actions that have a payoff in the next lives or in the future’. The intended technical meaning of the word has apparently nothing to do with the usual meaning. This case is even more problematic than the previous example for unfamiliar learners. Due to such unusual meanings of the usual words as well as due to a large number of unfamiliar words, students have a difficulty in understanding and expressing the concepts and, therefore, the meaning of the content if they do not know the specialized vocabulary which represents the domain’s concepts and principles. In such a case, it is nearly impossible for the students to read, talk about, write about and understand information about the domain. Indeed, educational authorities advise us that “wide vocabulary and broad knowledge go together” [5] and that “vocabulary knowledge is knowledge” [12], which is true to a greater extent in the academic domains. Or that vocabulary knowledge impacts achievement in all areas of the curriculum because words are necessary for communicating the content [2]. Thus, a concerted effort by facilitators in classrooms or outside classrooms to provide a comprehensive vocabulary program may be what it takes to significantly impact students' vocabulary development and to narrow the gap. Difficulties in Vocabulary Learning: Word forms may differ in difficulty for coding and storing dependent on the learner’s prior phonotactic knowledge [10]. When a learner embarks on the learning of an entirely new word in a language that is morphologically and phonetically unrelated to any language already known, s/he may experience great difficulties in storing isolated as well as clustered sounds or letters [10]. Studies have shown that repetition of new word forms in the form of overt or silent articulation (reading) is only briefly held in the working memory and it interferes with learning of the new vocabulary [10]. Similarly, the learning of academic vocabulary and morphology was hindered by articulatory suppression in specific virtual environments. On the other hand, one of the subjective, knowledge-dependent factors affecting a word’s memorability is the arbitrariness of the form-meaning link, i.e., arbitrariness in terms of existing lexical knowledge. And the learner’s prior familiarity with various aspects of the linguistic system also influences learning [10]. III.
meanings, which means vocabulary learning from dictionaries is an error-prone process which requires cognitive sophistication. Recent research focuses specially on the relationship between the lookup behavior and vocabulary knowledge on the one hand and inference ability on the other hand, taking into account the influence of task variables such as reading goal, word relevance and word inferability. Observations from these studies claim that the learners did not lookup all unfamiliar words, with the lookup behavior most strongly related to the perceived relevance of the word and only modestly to readers' vocabulary knowledge. Interestingly, the ability to infer word meaning from context was not related to lookup behavior at all, which suggests that a substantial proportion of good guessers may have been inclined to check their guesses subsequently [6]. According to the Depth-of-Processing Hypothesis (DOPH) shallow processing or dictionary lookup may be detrimental to vocabulary learning/retention [7], [11]. Also, there is no significant difference in the improvement in lexical knowledge. B. Multimedia Based Content Multimedia environments (hypertext links, animations etc.) provide an opportunity for highly textured linguistic and extra-linguistic environments. This raises the question of whether such environments could stimulate and generally positively affect second language (L2) vocabulary learning. A survey of recent studies of multimedia annotations has cited that the effectiveness of multimedia annotations with pictures and text yielded better results than annotations with text and video or text only [7]. Paivio's dual-coding theory postulates that a combination of modes or media contributes to greater learning success, which would predict a similar success rate for pictures + text and video + text conditions. One of the studies found that with reference to the dual-coding theory, the multimedia environments stimulate learning when they adopt a mixed approach and another study focused on the relationship between lookup patterns and retention found that accessing a multiplicity of information (using multiple dictionaries) reinforces retention, and that individual lookup preferences apparently play an important role [4], [7]. However, the above study could not discover any uniform relationship between retention and look-up preferences. C. Explict Representation In general, a non-virtual environment expects hard copies of notepad/file/writing-pads etc. in which you can write down all the vocabulary that you studied and expressions that you come across elsewhere. It decently helps in a rehearsal process and feedback, but in a virtual environment, especially in the above mentioned methods, there were no feedback mechanisms and the entire process has to depend on learners' reading comprehension and previous experience of the phonetic and morphological recognition. One important aspect of learning vocabulary is to associate the words and expressions with a particular context as this helps in remembering them better.
CONTENT PRESENTATION MODELS
A. Dictionary Look-up Traditional dictionaries (especially bilingual ones) fall far short of providing complete coverage of word
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Learner Level Module: Functionally, this module describes the decision making process at the users' end in terms of content presentation. This decision will be made on the basis of the elicited information from the questionnaire which was presented in the user interface and also the vocabulary knowledge of the particular learner, based on the Item Response Theory (IRT) [1]. Content Presentation Module: This module will consist of an engine that extracts required content from the domain’s database selectively. Selected content corresponds to the pre-defined games. This selection of games and content is based completely on the output of the Learner Level module. Finally, the selected games are presented on the interfaces as specified in Fig-1. This loop continues until the user reaches the highest level. Levels of content are pre-defined with respect to the frequency of the terminology existing in domain specific corpus. But the corpus and the games will be updated according to the responses of the learners. The domain independent database will be filled with the domain-specific corpus with glosses.
In view of the above situations, in an explicit presentation model we must consider the challenges of content presentation while representing things such as: •Typical word combinations– you might, for example, show adjectives or verbs. •Typical word associations – between nouns that you want to learn, or nouns, adverbs or prepositions associated with a verb. • Special features of the word – is there anything special about its grammar or pronunciation, or is there a peculiar characteristic of either its written or spoken form? • Additional word that helps – does a verb have a strongly related noun, or what is the opposite of an adjective? • Extended uses of the word being focused on – can it be used metaphorically, or does the same word have other meanings in the way that so many words do. • Other information that might help – is it similar to any word in your own language, or does it, perhaps, share a root with a word that you already know. These challenges have defined our understanding of academic vocabulary learning and guided us closer and closer to the paradigm shift exemplified by virtual environment, but a common understanding about aspects of quality and the different perspectives available in the design of virtual learning environments is still needed. The following statements may best reflect common convictions about the kind of learning that online learning environments should bring to life from the perspectives of developing a program primarily based on the technological infrastructure, the availability of learning content, and providing flexibility to learners: Technology perspective: Learning is distributed in that it “makes use of mixed or multimedia tools to bridge the distance between teacher and learner” [13]. Content perspective: Learning is blended in that it “employs multiple strategies, methods, and delivery systems” including e-based and print-based resources [11]. Learner perspective: Learning is flexible in that it “expands the choice on what, when, where, and how people learn” [9]. Methodological perspective: Informal mode, learning information must be presented explicitly, information should not be lost and it should be relevant to the learner's learning attitude, e.g. games for vocabulary learning. This will reduce the cognitive load on the learner [14]. In the next section we present architecture for building games for learning, which tries to take into account these perspectives. IV.
Figure 1: Game-based approach. The interface consists of a questionnaire form during the registration process, followed by a login page and it has a feedback mechanism which is monitored by the module administrator.
V.
IMPLIMENTED GAMES: A FIRST STEP
As a first step in the direction of building better virtual environments for learning academic vocabulary based on the discussion and arguments presented in the preceding sections, we have implemented an application containing four games (quizzes). These games are meant for children only, not for adults. To play, the user has to login to the application. Each game has five levels and each level carries 20 marks. The learner must score 85% to enter into the next level. All the tasks we have chosen are recognition tasks and none of them are recall tasks. We have done this because of two main reasons. The first is the limitation of the computing environments (for example typing in Indian languages). Another reason is that the motivation will be less if any constraints occur in the task, making it harder. After the learner/user answers, the correct answer will be shown immediately. At end of the game, the application will show the mistakes in red color as well as the total
GAMES FOR LEARNING: ARCHITECTURE
Interface: From the user's point of view, what is needed is a design of a user friendly interface that is not complicated to use. Similarly, from the administrative point of view, the design has to facilitate eliciting the required information from users based on their responses to the questions for module selection, like individual linguistic knowledge, domain knowledge, personal details etc. The questions can be presented to the learners in the form of a questionnaire. The functionality and navigation of such an interface could have features similar to the existing social websites such as Facebook, Bibo, Orkut etc.
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VII. CONCLUSIONS
score. If the learner/user reaches 85% score, the gate will open for the next level. After logging in to the application, the user can opt to 'play' any game (quiz), irrespective of the order of the games. The application contains following pages: • Home Page and Login • Registration • Game Page (Game Selection) • Play Page • Admin Page (Control Panel)
Conventional classroom based learning has some limitations that makes it unsuitable for vocabulary in academic domains such as school or college level science subjects. Virtual environments, if based on the insights gained from research in the cognitive aspects of language, can be more effective. We considered a game-based architecture for such environments. We described four games that we have implemented as a first step towards building a vocabulary learning framework. We plan to continue this work by implementing more applications and evaluating them for their effectiveness.
Home Page: This page contains information about the application, do’s and don’ts, login window, forgot password link and other such options. Registration Page: All the users or learners have to register before playing the games in this application. In this page the users have to give few details to maintain their credentials and the score. Once registration is successful then s/he will be moved to the quiz page. Game Page: All the registered users or learners can directly access this page. All the games will be displayed here with very brief information about the game. The user can select any game and start playing it. Play Page: Once the game (quiz) is selected for playing from the quiz page, then s/he will be moved to the play page. Here the questions will be displayed with the options that you need to choose. Admin Page: This is a control panel to upload quizzes and some more facilities to change the application according to the user needs. VI.
VIII. FUTURE WORK We emphasize the need for extending this work for further research into conducting perceptual experiments to compare with other similar mechanism and also to evaluate the games for vocabulary learning. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to acknowledge the suggestions made by reviewers which we have tried to take into account as far as possible. We would like to thank the participants for their help and for providing the time and data for analysis. REFERENCES [1] [2]
IMPLIMENTED GAMES [3]
A. Game-1: Image Identification In this game, a sequence of images will be displayed and the user has to identify the names of the images and has to choose from the available options for each image. In this game, the answer will be given immediately after submission of each question. Once the game ends, the total score will be displayed to the user.
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B. Game -2: Word Matching This game is about matching words. Users will be given two sets of words and they need to match one set of words with the correct one-word meanings in the other set.
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C. Game-3: Image-Name Matching This is also a matching kind of game except that in one set all the images will be given and in the other set the names of the images will be given in a jumbled order. The user has to identify the correct name of the image and has to match the images with their names.
[9]
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D. Game- 4: Deep Meaning In this game, the user has to find the correct meaning of the given word among the options. An image is presented and the user has to select the correct explanation out of the ones given. The images and names are, of course, from the domain whose vocabulary (terminology) the learner is trying to learn.
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