HYPA, un outil d’innovation en linguistique appliquée

Abstract

This article presents an innovative application suite of pedagogical tools that aim to help people learn, recognize, and write sinograms and lexicon using gestures, thus allowing for the birth of a gestural lexicography based on an original approach to Chinese writing. These encoding gestures are designated by the neologism tracemes. They can be easily learned by assimilating an enriched, alphabetically transcribed version of Chinese characters, hence the name given to this suite of tools: HYPA, which stands for for HYper Pinyin Alphabet. The suite of tools that have already been prototyped are a transcriber (Transcriber Characters HYPA, or TCH) and a keyboard-compass tool (Gestural Semantic Keyboard, or GSK). A new methodology to promote an operational approach in the field of lexicon teaching-learning, HYPA is based on a digital dictionary that is currently only bilingual (Chinese-French) but will eventually be multilingual. This suite of tools therefore intends to "redesign [the] teaching of lexicon" (Nonnon, 2012) in Chinese by associating a specific gesture (traceme) with each spelling. Here, we detail the macrostructure and the microstructure of HYPA, the innovations in its dictionary, and the didactics of lexiculture that this application suite has allowed us to consider for our students.

Keywords

• Hypa
• innovation tool
• lexicography
• learning dictionary
• gestural lexididactics