Vocabgram

Abstract

Vocabulary knowledge can be divided into receptive|being able to understand the meaning of a word and productive knowledge|being able to produce a word on one's own account. While both receptive and productive knowledge is equivalently important factors to language proficiency, existing vocabulary learning tasks tend to focus on receptive learning due to difficulties in designing and grading productive tasks. In this work, we present Vocabgram, a two-staged vocabulary learning system that enhances the depth of vocabulary knowledge. Our Vocabgram exposes learners to multiple occurrences of unknown words in an authentic context and provides a series of structured learning activities to ensure effective learning. To assess our system, we implemented a baseline interface to compare with. The results from the user study with 18 participants show that users that learned words with Vocabgram reported a higher level of confidence in regards to the knowledge of new words and performed 20.05% better on a receptive knowledge assessment task.