Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The site is designed for learners who have acquired a basic reading knowledge of
English in school, but have a limited understanding of American culture, and have
had a limited opportunity to develop and practice their conversational skills. It
contains a set of lessons that focus on the language and culture of situations that arise
in everyday life in the United States, as well as cultural topics of particular interest.
To develop the set of topics, we interviewed recent immigrants to the United States to
find out what situations they found particularly surprising or challenging. The site
contains a set of lessons where they learn conversational language and cultural points
relevant to these situations and topics, and exercises in which they practice in
simulated conversational situations. A speech recognition plug-in is loaded into the
user's Web browser, enabling learners to speak English into a microphone and have
the non-player characters in the situation respond to what they say. In the situation
shown in Fig. 2, the learner is getting to know an acquaintance named Malika and is
talking about their relationships. The learner has found out that Malika has a
boyfriend (see the dialog history in the top center of the figure) and can now ask
further questions, such as when and where they met. If the learner is uncertain as to
what to say, he or she can consult a menu of hints about conversational topics (top
left, in Chinese) and possible ways of expressing each particular topic (center left).
The learner's score for the exercise depends upon the total number of dialog
exchanges, and the extent to which the learner relied on hints to get through the
scenarios.
There are multiple versions of the goEnglish Web site, aimed at different learner
communities. In addition to the Chinese site shown in Fig. 2, there is a site in Persian,
and sites for speakers of Russian and other languages are currently under
development.
3 Cultures Modeled to Date
Developing Alelo courses requires knowledge of the culture being taught. This is used
both to develop learning materials that teach about the culture, and to develop
animated agents that behave in accordance with the norms of the culture, as in Figs. 1
and 2. Depending upon the target audience and the learning objectives of the course,
some courses provide extensive instruction in the local language, and include
characters that understand and speak only the local language, while others include a
more limited amount of language instruction and engage in conversation in the
learner's native language.
It is also important to have a good understanding of the learner's culture to help
ensure that the learning materials and objectives are presented in a style, and with
language and phraseology, that match the learner's expectations. As noted above,
goEnglish is available in multiple languages. Likewise, Operational Dari is available
in versions intended for use by the military services of the United States, Australia,
the United Kingdom, Germany, and other NATO countries. The instructional
language of the one for Germany is in German; all the others are in English. Course
details vary slightly in each case to reflect the learner's culture. Differences include
uniforms and physical appearance of game characters, artwork, as well as
terminology, spelling, and phraseology. Voiceovers and narrations may be recorded
