ISCA International Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE 2011) Venice, Italy August 24-26, 2011

Listening Comprehension Games for Portuguese: Exploring the Best Features

Rui Correia (1,2,3), Thomas Pellegrini (1), Maxine Eskenazi (3), Isabel Trancoso (1,2), Jorge Baptista (1,4), Nuno Mamede (1,2)

(1) INESC-ID Lisboa, Portugal; (2) IST, Lisboa, Portugal
(3) Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
(4) University of Algarve, Portugal

This paper investigates which features would be the best to include in a listening comprehension game for European Portuguese. The goal is to develop a method to motivate non-native speakers of Portuguese to engage themselves in activities intended to develop their listening comprehension skills. The approach adopted herein consisted in providing students with several sets of exercises, each set with some slight variations over the previous one. Finally, a questionnaire was presented to the students with the intent of receiving feedback about the most adequate functionalities. The paper also explores students main difficulties with the language so as to define learning models able to adapt the difficulty level of the exercises to each individual’s language proficiency level.
Index Terms. CALL, Portuguese, Listening Comprehension, Games

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Correia, Rui / Pellegrini, Thomas / Eskenazi, Maxine / Trancoso, Isabel / Baptista, Jorge / Mamede, Nuno (2011): "Listening comprehension games for portuguese: exploring the best features", In SLaTE-2011, 5-8.