Enriching the web for vocabulary learning

Abstract

People spend large amount of time browsing the Web while fulfilling various needs, but they find it difficult to spare some time for education. We believe that the time spent by browsing can be used more efficiently. We proposed a method for web augmentation during casual web browsing, which facilitates foreign language vocabulary learning. Our method substitutes words on a web page for their foreign equivalents and exposes a user to unknown words. We conducted a small qualitative experiment to study how users perceive word substitution in web pages and how it affects their foreign language vocabulary. Results showed that web page augmentation improves user's vocabulary size without negatively affecting his browsing experience. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.