I am masters degree student and I have to write an essay for "Usability and Interaction design" subjects. I have chosen topic "Designing Software for Learning Foreign Languages" . My proposal is approved but in feedback my teacher told me that proposal is lacking a research question and provide a more informative title for your essay. She also has asked me to try to identify an interesting or problematic aspect of learning software for foreign language instruction that you want to research.
Now I need ideas and suggestion that how I can make my essay a research. What could be a aspect of learning software for foreign language that I can research and discuss. Really need help. I need someone to understand and discuss it with me so that I am clear what I should do.
Thanks in advance!
One of the problems with software and foreign languages is that the size of words in different languages differ.
Example:
English is short (English)
Angleš?ina je kratka (Slovenia)
Englanti on lyhyt (Finnish)
This affects menu's and dialogs of an user interface quite a lot, e.g. if you want to show a text and its translation side by side the beginning of lines get out of sync quite fast. A way to solve this is to use different fonts, add spaces etc. BUt there are many other ways, which is better? can they be used on screen? paper?
Another problem in these side by side translations is that you want to know which word maps on which word, due to grammar the position of words relative to each other differs. Tree-views of grammar analysis can help explain the structure of the languages. Maybe give the same word the same colour, or size...
English is short (English)
Angleš?ina je kratka (Slovenia)
I would be interested in how software generated mindmaps of vocabulary help to learn new words.
E.g. the word hospital relates to doctor, nurse, surgery etc. Learning by SW generated translated mindmaps might be a faster way to learn new words. I draw my mindmap in English and the computer draws the same one in Spanish etc