Design of Adaptive Micro-Content in Second Language Acquisition

Abstract

Content adaptation with respect to different devices technical constrains is often a necessary step to make content usable. Moreover, in the field of Language Learning, content adaptation to different devices involves rather peculiar issues, if compared to other domains. Every teaching module is made up of different interconnected components: the educational technique, the abilities and competences it aims to develop and the activity type implementing the technique. It must however be kept in mind that adaptation may involve changes in terms of format, mode or type of activity which can result in alterations as regards the abilities the content was originally developed for. In this paper we deal with these issues and introduce our approach to address them, in particular as regards content to be delivered through the CLiRe online language learning environment. Our approach consists in the design of micro-content that can be processed by an ontology representing the above mentioned relationships and by means of reasoning mechanisms capable of deciding which changes need to be done to adapt a given content to a specific device.

Keywords

• adaptive systems
• micro Learning Object
• device-adapted content
• ontology-based reasoning
• CALL (computer-assisted language learning)