Throughout its history, the United States has been the great melting pot, attracting immigrants from all over the world. Particularly recently, public schools have been challenged to provide English-as-a-Second- Language (ESL) instruction to an ever more complex mix of children. For example, in Waltham, MA (the site of the offices of the applicant company, Praxis, Inc.), children speaking nearly sixty separate native languages attend the public schools. Compounding this communication problem, current practice is to include children with mental retardation and other developmental disabilities in regular classrooms, including those for whom English is not the primary language. Thus, ESL instruction has become an extremely complex proposition, and teachers are challenged to provide effective instruction for their students. The proposed product, PAVE, will be the first of a planned suite of teacher-support tools for ESL and other second-language learning applications. The product will implement programmed instructional technology that is based on more than 30 years of federally-sponsored research. While this technology is in the public domain, no one has yet applied it to the problem of ESL instruction. Praxis, Inc. intends to correct this problem. PAVE will implement a combination of instructional methods of proven effectiveness to create prototype ESL software for teaching and practicing basic vocabulary skills. The intent is not to create a product that teaches a specific language. Rather, the product is conceptualized as a more general authoring system for creating computer programs for ESL vocabulary instruction and practice. The product will have separate modular components for students who can and cannot read in their native language. Using PAVE, a class room teacher can work with the child and/or native speakers (e.g., parents) to create individualized computer-based instruction to support ESL vocabulary instruction in the classroom and home. A unique feature of PAVE is that it can potentially help meet needs of children whose native language is not widely represented in recent immigrant populations.
