A Tool For Learning Foreign Languages

The Reading Assistant is a multimedia interactive system designed to help people learn a foreign language. It does so by promoting learning in context: language material is always presented as part of originally unedited foreign-language text. Students learn a language by reading text with the aid of tools such as online dictionaries, grammars, and translation aids. The recorded pronunciation of individual words And sentences is also available and can be played back as often as needed. The Reading Assistant allows all aspects of the interaction to be controlled by the student, and minimizes information overload through the use of statistical grammars. While the system is designed to help English speakers loam a second language, the results of an experiment show that it could easily be extended to teach English as a second language to non-native English speakers.