GR1 - Task analysis

User analysis

User Types:

Students:

Characteristics:

- High school/college level and age. Technologically apt.

- slightly to moderately literate in foreign language of study

- motivation is to expand personal knowledge of a foreign language

Role: Using the website as a supplement or class assignment for a language class.

Teachers:

Characteristics:

- Ages and technological aptitude both vary. Purpose is to effectively educate students in the foreign language

- expert in foreign language of study

- motivation is to teach students

Role: Select proper example/supplementary material for students, also contributes material.

Sentence Contributors (can be advanced students or teachers, must have contributor privilege):

Characteristics: Of all ages and regions. Familiar with the language information is being contributed in. Competent in using technology.

Role: Philanthropic contribution of language supplementary resources. 

Task analysis

Finding reading material

Prerequisites

User is reading out of a textbook for which sentences have been added to the database.

- textbook will only have to be specified once. Chapter will be periodically updated

- may want to persist this information (using a login system)

User is studying a course for which the teacher has aggregated sentences.

Subtasks

Inform the system of what textbook you're reading, and what chapter you're reading in.

Inform the system of any particular idioms, grammar patterns, or vocabulary you'd like to practice.

Time constraints

A first-time user will want to be able to access reading material as soon as possible, hence this should take as little time as possible

Frequency

Frequently used by students.

Observations

Students in foreign language classes often encounter similar difficulties when understanding certain materials as previous students in the course. More experienced students can contribute greatly towards helping new students understand language concepts that the experienced students once had trouble with. Therefore, contributor privileges for experienced students will also be beneficial.

Reading

Prerequisites

User's level of reading needs to be determined beforehand.

Subtasks

Understand the meaning

Define words you didn't understand

Focus your review on vocabulary you didn't understand.

Observations

When students complete reading assignments, he often consults with peers (who are relative experts in the language) when he encounters a difficult sentence. Students will usually ask the expert to give specific examples of correct vocabulary usage to clarify the meaning of the sentence. Students will also often construct hypothetical sentences and ask experts to verify them. This observation suggests that students attempt to learn vocabulary by seeing its usage in various contexts.

Adding examples of user-level reading and translations

Requirements

User should be trusted to not spam the website.

Subtasks

Provide the sentence in the foreign language

Provide the translation in the native language

Indicate what reading abilities are required to understand this sentence

Observations

Contributors tend to be students in higher levels of the language and are contributing to help students at a lower level. Most contributions are constructive; however, students required by professors to contribute materials to such a site might be unenthusiastic about making a stellar example. 

Creating a collection of supplementary reading for a class

Requirements

Example sentences using the vocabulary and sentence patterns that is being covered in the class must have been added into the database of sentences beforehand.

Observations

Currently, several course websites for MIT language courses add a "supplementary readings" section where example sentences in the foreign language are presented in plain text. The examples emphasize on the sentence patterns, idioms, and vocabulary that have been learned in recent lessons.

Often, the sentences presented may utilize supplementary material in addition to what has been presented in the textbook. For example, the textbook may be romanized, but the example sentences may have been written in their original character set. Thus, these sentences are not appropriate for presentation to the textbook readers in general, who would be unable to read them, but would still be useful to have in a centralized location for the class. Moreover, some students seem to have an aversion towards asking questions in class, so this type of supplementary material will contribute to the understanding of the non-talkative student.

Therefore, in addition to allowing users to select sentences to be presented to them based on their progress in a textbook, another desirable ability would be to have teachers be able to augment the sentences presented to their users with custom sentences (in addition to those that are associated with the textbook).

Subtasks

Locate sample sentences that utilize the idioms and vocabulary taught in the curriculum.

Inform students about newly available supplementary sentences once they are covered in class.

Domain analysis