In this collaboration, investigators from GMU and MIT will pursue a computational tutoring and learning environment for foreign language learning. GMU will enhance its naturalistic, immersion- style foreign language experience. Based on the premise that language is most thoroughly and memorably learned in the course of meaningful use, this system integrates dialogue and rich graphical interaction in the context of everyday scenes. The MIT group has over four years built extensive theory-based natural language processing software with language independent semantics and multi-level error handling especially designed for tutorial purposes. The collaboration will have important research benefits in both directions. The MIT language software will greatly enhance the GMU immersion system and permit a proper study of its efficacy. The error diagnosis capabilities will permit an investigation of student modeling, with potential long- term consequences for the study of both intelligent tutoring systems and psycholinguistics.
