PARLING: e-Literature for Supporting Children Learning
English as a Second Language
Ornella Mich Elena Betta
ITC – irst ITC – irst
via Sommarive, 18 via Sommarive, 18
POVO, TN 38050 ITALY POVO, TN 38050 ITALY
+39 0461 314582 +39 0461 314526
mich@itc.it betta@itc.it
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we describe Parling, a multimedia system for
supporting learning of English as a second language (L2). It is
devoted to 8-11 year-old primary school children. The idea behind
the system is that famous children’s literature offers the right
motivating and low-anxiety context where users can improve their
vocabulary and learn new language structures. The technological
core of the system is a speech recognizer that allows
implementing automatic pronunciation assessment. Parling is an
adaptive system; it features a set of instructional games that
change their vocabulary content dynamically based on the user’s
learning needs. A preliminary usability test of the prototype
system gave positive results.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User
interfaces - Graphical user interfaces (GUI), Voice I/O.
General Terms
Human Factors.
Keywords
Computer aided language learning, automatic children speech
recognition, adaptive interfaces, learning by playing.
1. INTRODUCTION
The aim of this paper is to present Parling (Parla inglese - Speak
English), a multimodal system designed to support learning of
English as L2. Devoted to Italian children aged 8 to 11, Parling is
based on famous children’s English literature. The user can
choose from a list of well-know children’s stories, appropriate for
her age and English level. She can listen to the story and read it,
play entertaining games with individualized content, try word
pronunciations and explore a pictorial dictionary.
Learning a second language requires the student to learn to listen
to, speak, read and write that language, often without exposure to
it outside school. The new technologies provide opportunities for
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ACM 1-58113-815-6/04/0001.
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Diego Giuliani
ITC – irst
via Sommarive, 18
POVO, TN 38050 ITALY
+39 0461 314556
giuliani@itc.it
creating learning environments that extend the possibilities of
traditional technologies such as books, blackboards, and linear
one-way communication media (radio and television shows). In
new environments students can learn by doing, receive feedback,
refine their understanding and build new knowledge [2, 7]. They
can also interact with the teacher and their peers by means of
email and wireless technology, creating the collaborative context
necessary to adequately learn a language.
Thematically-based bilingual programs are quite successful in
language acquisition [4]. The children's own environment (family,
school ...) are good sources of theme units, but in addition to
these, children's literature offers an interesting medium for
learning a new language. Thematic literature contains repetitive
patterns that reinforce the user’s vocabulary and structures.
Carefully chosen children’s literature allows children to develop
their receptive language in an entertaining, meaningful context
and naturally invites them to repeat many of the predictable words
and sentences. Moreover, literature can provide a motivating and
low-anxiety context for language learning. Literature provides
background knowledge and cultural information [3]. Literature-
based, thematic, and content-based approaches in foreign
language programs help teachers to build emotional, social, and
intellectual responses to the natural language of engaging stories
[8].
As research has demonstrated, reading aloud to children produces
positive effects at any age. Jim Trelease, author of The Read-
Aloud Handbook [9], tells us that reading aloud to children
“stimulates their interest, their emotional development, their
imagination, and their language”. Language skills are fostered
when children listen to the same stories over and over again until
they develop an almost unconscious familiarity with literary
elements and story structure. Their vocabulary grows larger by the
story [1]. But reading aloud at school is a highly time-consuming
activity; teachers cannot dedicate too much time to it. Systems
like Parling can solve this problem. With Parling installed on their
own computer at home, children can listen to the story as many
times as they like.
Language learning is hard work. Effort is required at every
moment and must be maintained over a long period of time.
Games help and encourage many learners to sustain their interest
and work. Through playing games, students can learn English the
way children learn their mother tongue without being aware they
are studying. Vocabulary acquisition is increasingly viewed as
crucial to language acquisition. The use of games is considered
highly important for presenting and revising vocabulary [5, 10].
For these reasons a lot of games have been inserted into Parling,
which use only words coming from the story.
A brief description of the Parling structure will be given in the
next section, followed by a presentation of the results of a
preliminary test of the system, taken by a small group of primary
school children. At the end, our future work will be presented.
2. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
The basic idea of Parling is learning a foreign language by reading
classic works of that language’s literature. At the same time,
Parling is based on the learning-by-playing paradigm. So there is
a story as a leading thread, and several games aimed at helping
students memorize the vocabulary of the story.
A listen-and-repeat tool is always available to help the child to
improve her comprehension and pronunciation. Automatic
pronunciation assessment is implemented with a speech
recognition engine developed in house. As acoustic characteristics
of speech such as formant frequencies and duration depend on the
age of the speaker, acoustic models of the speech recognizer were
trained on a corpus of speech collected from 8 to 12 year old
children.
The vocabulary content of the games is targeted to the user
expertise: it is dynamically built up with the words that the child
didn’t know before finding them in the story. When the user,
while reading the story, selects one of the active words to learn its
meaning or to try its pronunciation, that word is immediately
memorized by each system game and proposed the next time the
user recalls that game.
Figure 1. Parling: the starting page and the visual dictionary
At the beginning, Parling presents the user with a menu of stories
to read, a list of games, and a box displaying the alphabet letters.
The latter is the entry to a visual dictionary that the user can scroll
through and look for the meaning of words (see Figure 1).
2.1 Back and forth through the story
After choosing a story, the child can freely go back and forth
through its pages by using a navigation bar. Each time a page is
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loaded, its corresponding audio is played back. There is also
background music playing all the time.
When the user clicks on one of the anchor words, an explanation
window appears that explains the meaning of the words (see
Figure 2). Then, by clicking the appropriate buttons the user can
hear the pronunciation of the word and she can also try to utter the
word herself. The system will respond with a message telling
whether the word was pronounced correctly or not. For the
moment, a simple binary response, i.e. an accepted/rejected
response, is provided.
Figure 2. Parling: a story page example and the explanation
window
A play! button allows the user to start a game, based on the words
the child has activated during the story flowing.
Currently there is one story available. The well-known Peter Pan
has been chosen, because it is widely popular among Italian
children, and so we think it is easy to understand even for a
beginner English learner. Of course, this is a simplified and
condensed version, about three hundred words long.
3. PRELIMINARY USABILITY TEST
We organized a pilot usability study with a first Parling prototype.
In this study we wanted to test three aspects: first, if children were
interested in using the proposed system; second, the system
usability; and finally, the software bugs. Three children 11 years
old, two boys and a girl, selected from amongst the pupils of a
fourth grade in a local primary school, participated in the
experiment. Without any preliminary explanation, they tried
Parling.
As a first result, we noted that children did not consider the
system boring: indeed they were concentrated during the entire
test session and they were not distracted by the three observers;
moreover, they would have liked to continue to use it even after
the established time, 30 minutes. Two of the children listened
sequentially to the entire story, activating the majority of anchor
words, listening to the single word pronunciation and trying to
utter it. After finishing the story, they went back and forth through
it, listening again to some words and uttering them. We noticed
that children were able to navigate through the story using the
appropriate self-explanatory buttons.
Observing children using the speech recognizer, we noted that
more sophisticated and comprehensible feedback is necessary:
when the child received a positive answer on his pronunciation
after some negative answers, he did not understand what had
changed in his pronunciation.
The efficacy and usability of the visual dictionary could not be
tested as the dictionary was not yet implemented.
4. FUTURE WORK
Speech recognition technology has a great potential for
applications in the field of computer assisted language learning
(CALL). In a preceding study [5] we found that the way of
reporting the system response to the user on her pronunciation is
really important. Teachers argued that the pronunciation
assessment functionality of the system is really useful only if it is
reliable and pertinent comprehensible feedback is given to the
user. Being conscious that erroneous feedback has negative effects
on the acquisition of L2 pronunciation [6], specific research will
focus on effective ways of giving feedback on the pronunciation.
Rather than an accepted/rejected response, we will investigate
how to give indications on what was wrong with the utterance.
This will imply also an improvement of our speech recognition
technology. An animated agent could be useful in giving complex
pronunciation hints.
In order to make the application more appealing, more games will
be designed. Furthermore, to allow the teacher to monitor the
pupil’s home activity, a session logging functionality will be
implemented.
It is also our intention to measure the efficacy of Parling in the
acquisition of English as L2. For this reason, a new version of
Parling will be implemented in the near future that will run also
on handheld computers. Using these easily portable and low-cost
computers will allow us to test the system with two classes at a
local primary school, because each child in one class will have a
personal handheld device. The English teacher will use Parling as
a support tool for integrating his teaching. In the other class, the
teacher will give the same English notions, without the support of
Parling. After an established period of time (two or three months),
the children’s level of English knowledge in the two classes will
be compared.
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5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are indebted to the English teacher Sergio Amadori for his
effective collaboration and to the Villalagarina primary school for
allowing the use of their structures for our experiment. Particular
thanks to James Askham who is the English voice of Parling.
This work was partially financed by the European Commission
under the project PF-STAR.
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