Interactive Bilingual Books Designed for Language Learning
littlebooks.co
While there are countless social benefits, professional opportunities, and cognitive gains for those to speak multiple languages, learning second languages can be very challenging. A common issue is that is difficult for students to independently engage with authentic meaningful content. Furthermore, while many SLA theorists support the use of a whole language approach, in essence, recognizing words as whole pieces of language, much foreign language educational material currently focuses on explicit grammar instruction and word-level meaning.
LittleBooks is a platform that supports highly interactive bilingual multimodal “books” designed to uniquely support second language acquisition. The first prototype is an iPad book targeted at adult English speakers with a low-intermediate Spanish-language proficiency. The design of LittleBooks was guided by three principles, based on research and testing, firstly, language is presented through narrative structure. Secondly, learners need to hear the target language on demand and, lastly, learners need support and scaffolds to assist them in the reading process. LittleBooks facilitates an adaptive learning environment in which the content changes to meet students’ needs. As such content increases in difficulty as learners become more fluent.
The product is intended to be use in informal learning environments. During development, I used low-resolution prototypes to better understand how people interact with the design and to test the effectiveness of the learning outcomes. Learning was assessed through a variety of means including engagement, increased interest in language, and language ability.
Collaborator: Jason Clavelli (Stanford Computer Science)