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.
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.
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.
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
Frequently used by students.
User's level of reading needs to be determined beforehand.
Understand the meaning
Define words you didn't understand
Focus your review on vocabulary you didn't understand.
Subtasks
Provide the sentence in the foreign language
Provide the translation in the native language
Indicate what reading level is required to understand this sentence
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.
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).
Task: Teacher adds sample sentences for her course
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.