GR1 - Task analysis
User analysis
User
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Types:
i. Students:
Characteristics:
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- High school/college
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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
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or class assignment for a language class.
Teachers: ii. Teachers
Characteristics:
- Ages and technological aptitude both vary. Purpose is to effectively educate students in the foreign language
- expert in foreign language
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of study
- motivation is to teach students
Role: Select proper example/supplementary material for students, also contributes
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material. iii.
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. iv. Textbook Publishers
Task analysis
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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 that is at my reading level, and read it.Specify to the website what textbook you're learning fromreading, 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.
Lookup readings and definitions of unknown characters
Add examples of reader-understandable sentences.
Assemble a collection of sample sentences for your course from existing sentences on the website.
Contribute translations of existing sentences.
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
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