Tools for Supporting Language Acquisition via Extensive Reading

Abstract

Extensive reading, that is, the reading of large quantities of text at a comfortable level of difficulty, has been shown to be of great benefit to second and foreign language learners skills. We define seven types of reading support as management, text generation, text selection, text simplification, preparation, translation, and revision. We describe and propose a range of tools that assist learners to locate reading material of an appropriate level of difficulty and manage their progress. Our prototype implementation of two of these tools, the Bilingual eReader and the Readable Extract Search Engine, demonstrate their feasibility.