A Multimedia Tool to Develop Learner Autonomy

Abstract

In our paper we present a multimedia tool which is based on our assumption that computers are much better suited in language learning to act in an organising and structuring capacity rather than to take up a role as a learning machine. READERS was developed jointly by a team of researchers from the universities of Essen and Wuppertal headed by Bernd Rüschoff (the editor of the present volume) and Dieter Wolff. It is a multimedia programme designed to help university students?not necessarily language students?with the difficult business of understanding texts in a foreign language. In the paper we will first describe the project in more general terms embedding it into the underlying learning psychological and pedagogic concepts. We will then look at the software in more detail, starting out from its structure and then dealing with the different modules which comprise the tool. The paper ends with a short technical description; we also discuss the problems which we have encountered until now.