Augmenting the Web for Second Language Vocabulary Learning

The busyness of everyday life means that those with casual interest in additional learning opportunities are often unable to schedule regular time and effort for studying. In this paper, we explore how to augment information technologies that people use on a daily basis to create micro-learning opportunities. In particular, we examine how a person's existing Web browsing experience-with first language Web pages-can be augmented to teach them second language vocabulary. We present a prototype, ALOE, which runs inside the Firefox Web browser and dynamically augments Web pages by replacing a selected set of English words with their foreign translations. The foreign translations are embedded in the rich context of a Web page's existing English text to promote incidental learning and guessing from context of the translated words. Through a two month user evaluation of ALOE, we found that most participants were able to learn an average of 50 new French vocabulary words.