George Henry and Robert Zerwekh
SEAsite: Web-based Interactive
Learning Resources for Southeast
Asian Languages and Cultures
George Henry
Robert Zerwekh
Northern Illinois University
ABSTRACT
SEAsite is a web-based interactive learning resource site for Southeast
Asian Languages (Indonesian, Tagalog, Thai, Khmer, Lao, Burmese, and
Vietnamese). Its language learning materials feature second language (L2)
script support, streaming audio, pictures, and interactive exercise types
that allow learners to test their understanding. Many SEAsite resources
about culture, politics, music, art, religion, and other subjects related to
Southeast Asia are written in English. A nonstandard, but workable, system for rendering Southeast Asian orthographies in web pages and interactive exercises is described. Computer code to support display of L2 characters in Java applets is available to interested parties.
KEYWORDS
L2 Fonts, Language Learning, Interactive Exercises, SEAsite, Southeast
Asian Languages
INTRODUCTION
Late in 1997, faculty from Northern Illinois University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies began development of an Internet site dedicated to the
delivery and promotion of Southeast Asian languages and cultures. Today,
SEAsite (www.seasite.niu.edu) features materials for both beginning and
intermediate students of Thai, Indonesian, Tagalog, and Vietnamese, with
Burmese, Lao, and Khmer under development. In this paper, we will describe SEAsite, discuss some of its more unusual features, and explain
how we solve the orthography problems posed by some of these languages
when delivery of material is made exclusively via the Internet.
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With support from the National Security Education Program and the
US Department of Education’s Title VI and International Research and
Studies programs, SEAsite is now completing its fourth year of development and operation at Northern Illinois University. The language materials consist of text, audio, and pictures, with online dictionaries for Thai,
Indonesian, and Tagalog, and interactive exercises and quizzes in many
lessons. Each language represented also has extensive English content on
the culture, history, religion, and peoples of the country where that language is spoken. This site is used daily by hundreds of teachers, students,
business people, and travelers. It is also used in our university’s “smart
classrooms” where our Southeast Asian language teachers investigate ways
to integrate web-based materials into classroom-based courses.
The Internet is especially suited for teaching and learning the less commonly taught languages of Southeast Asia. For Burmese, Lao, and Khmer,
in particular, there are few locales in the United States where one can
study these languages in a classroom environment. Any language instructional delivery system that does not involve humans working together will
not be able to teach all of the communicative language skills. This situation is true not only of SEAsite, but also of books, videos, tapes, and CDROMs. Therefore, SEAsite focuses on what it can do best, that is, on the
receptive skills of reading and listening, vocabulary acquisition, and, to a
limited degree, the productive skill of writing.
The web is in many ways the best mode of production as well as of
distribution of language learning materials. Web-based materials are interactive and can include practice and self-assessment activities. They can
offer color images, streaming audio, and video, all at the click of a mouse
(admittedly at present at relatively modest quality and size). Unlike any
other medium of instruction, web content can be continually updated and
augmented so that users automatically see the new material the next time
they access the site.
SEAsite FEATURES
Interactive exercise types (implemented in Java) have been developed
for SEAsite that allow learners to test and to practice skills such as vocabulary acquisition, reading comprehension, and grammatical sentence
construction. For Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese, Khmer, and Lao, all second
language (L2) words are displayed in their native orthography. Furthermore, most of the exercise types allow questions to be posed via text or
audio, in English or in L2. A description of each Java-based exercise type
follows.
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Multiple Choice
The multiple choice format, which is included in most computer based
systems featuring interactive testing, is a useful way to test quickly many
kinds of knowledge and skills. While such questions are easy to construct
and judge, they test recognition rather than production and may encourage random guessing rather than focus on content and meaning. One of
the multiple choice exercises on SEAsite presents questions in sets of three
and does not permit students to continue until they have answered all
three questions in the current set correctly. Moreover, the program specifies only how many of the questions were answered incorrectly, not the
specific question(s). Students must find and fix the errors, making random guessing difficult or tedious. In Figure 1, note that the “Judge” button is disabled. The button stays that way until all three questions in the
current set are answered.
Figure 1
Multiple Choice Quiz Applet
The “Hint” button will supply a textual hint and can be disabled by the
exercise author. If no audio accompanies the question, the “Play” button
is disabled.
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Flashcards
Flashcards are a time honored way for students to learn new vocabulary, a vital aspect of beginning language learning (Brown, 1994;
Zimmerman, 1997). This exercise presents words in random order each
time the exercise is viewed and lets students remove words as they master
them. Figure 2 shows a flashcard for Thai with its corresponding image
when the learner clicks the “Flip Card” button.
Figure 2
Flash Card Applet
Matching
Matching is another vocabulary acquisition device. While flashcards depend on a student’s introspective honesty in knowing whether a word is
correctly recalled, matching gives immediate and explicit feedback. A student clicks one word (English or L2) and then its other language mate. If
the selection is correct, immediate graphical feedback is given; otherwise
nothing happens. Furthermore, the arrangement of the words on the screen
is different each time the exercise is taken, so students cannot depend on
a word’s position to remember a given match. Figure 3 displays a matching exercise from the Vietnamese site.
Figure 3
Matching Applet
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Vocabulary Arcade Game
The Vocabulary Arcade Game is a third type of vocabulary practice exercise. The game presents an L2 target word together with several pictures moving across the screen. The user’s task is to click the picture of
the word shown. If the “hit” is correct, the picture disappears and another
word is displayed. Obviously, nouns are easily practiced in this way, but
many other grammatical types can be illustrated and tested (e.g., certain
verbs and adjectives). Figure 4 presents a Thai recognition exercise of
color words.
Figure 4
Arcade Game Applet
Word Drag and Drop
The word-drag-and-drop format is a more flexible and sophisticated exercise type that presents a task involving manipulation of syllables, words,
or phrases. The student uses the mouse to drag text chunks (single letters,
syllables, words, or phrases, not all of which need be part of the correct
answer) into an order that forms the correct answer. This production task
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does not involve any typing, an important point because typing of nonRoman orthographies can be extremely difficult. The question types presented in this exercise can be simple (e.g., asking the student to form a
phrase using correct word order) or difficult (e.g., asking the student to
form a complete sentence). Feedback is given in the form of edit markup
symbols that indicate how to fix the answer (e.g., interchanging two words,
eliminating an extra word, or substituting a different word). Figure 5 shows
a student’s attempt to construct the sentence stated in English at the top
of the display.
Figure 5
Word-Drag-and-Drop Applet
At the bottom of the display, the asterisk below the word indicates that
that word is correct; the angled brackets indicate that the other two words
need to be interchanged. The “Play” button, disabled in Figure 5, is enabled if the task has accompanying audio.
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Picture Drag and Drop
Picture Drag and Drop is particularly well suited to listening comprehension questions. A set of pictures is presented on the screen (e.g., books,
cups, table, or chair), and the learner is asked, for example, to “put the
books on the table.” The learner uses the mouse to drag the pictures to
accord with the spoken (or written) directive. Graphical feedback is given
to indicate which objects are in the correct place and which ones are not.
Figure 6 displays a picture-drag-and-drop example testing vocabulary.
Green lines around the object indicate that it is placed correctly (here,
Manggis and Durian).
Figure 6
Picture-Drag-and-Drop Applet
Email Quizzes
Email quizzes allow for multiple-choice or short-answer questions which
can be posed in written form, as an audio recording, or both and permit
feedback as each question is answered (at the author’s discretion) (see
Figure 7).
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Figure 7
Email Quiz Applet
Normally, results are shown to the student after the last question is answered. Quiz results can be emailed to the student’s instructor.
Online Dictionaries
Online dictionaries containing over 5,000 words are on the sites for
Indonesian, Tagalog, and (to a somewhat limited extent) Thai. Students
have easy access to the dictionaries and may look up words while reading
or listening. Most entries contain a short English definition, a longer English definition, an L2 definition, and sample sentences. Audio and pictures are available for selected words. Students may print the words looked
up during any session (and their accompanying information).
The retrieval software for the Indonesian and Tagalog dictionaries determines and searches on the root of a requested word whose inflected
form has been entered by the user. Both of these languages are heavily
inflected with suffixes, infixes, and prefixes that qualify root forms. Beginning students often find it difficult to determine the root form to look
up when a heavily inflected form is encountered. Since dictionaries are
organized by root form, this difficulty can be a serious problem. Thus, for
Indonesian, for example, if a student enters the word menyewekan, the
program determines that the root is sewa, searches for sewa in the dictionary, and then presents that word’s information. For the Tagalog word
itinakbo, the program determines and searches on the root form takbo.
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Streaming Audio
Streaming audio with the voice of a native speaker reading text passages is available in many of the lessons. In addition, the dictionary described above can be made available to students at the click of a button, or
specialized glossaries may be provided in the case of unusual words or
words that are not in the dictionary.
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
Culture is often the gateway to learning a language. People generally
become interested in learning less commonly taught languages either
through travel abroad or experiences with speakers of those languages.
All sites have extensive information on the culture, art, history, politics,
and religion of their respective countries, much of it in both L2 and English.
The Indonesian site has material on Balinese and Javanese dance, the
traditional Indonesian music of Gamelan, and a large section on how batik is made and used. Forty-one stories of the epic Ramayana are present
(all with L2, English translation, and audio) in addition to 27 fables and
folklore stories (with accompanying L2 audio). The site features many
vocabulary lessons based on Indonesian concepts such as proverbs, family, the wildlife of the islands, and the foods and recipes of Indonesia.
There is also a section on Reformasi, the political movement in early 1998
that led to the downfall of the Suharto government.
The Thai site has a section on the writing system of Thailand and the
Thai alphabet. Animated graphics (.gif files) show how the characters are
drawn, and a Java writing applet lets students practice their writing skills.
Thai shadow puppets, famous temples, Thai cuisine, Thai classical music,
and the Songkran (the Thai New Year Festival) are on the site, along with
self-assessment exercises for tone discrimination of spoken Thai.
The Tagalog site contains structured language lessons for both beginning and intermediate students of the language. For both instructional
levels, separate lessons concentrate solely on vocabulary acquisition by
using a variety of learning strategies. There are also sections on Philippine
art, history, pre-colonial times, and Tagalog grammar. Finally, the Tagalog
site has a chat room where visitors can send messages in Tagalog and a
popular discussion forum for questions about the Tagalog language or
features of Philippine life or culture. Our Tagalog staff regularly monitors
this forum and provides answers or comments to questions.
The core of the Vietnamese site is a set of 20 language lessons for spoken Vietnamese. A pronunciation guide illustrates the consonants, vowels, and tones of Vietnamese, and another section has information on travel,
food, currency, and current Vietnamese news.
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We are also developing language and culture materials for Burmese,
Khmer, and Lao, which are taught at only a few area studies centers. Published language teaching materials for Burmese, Khmer, and Lao are outdated and have few supplementary teaching resources. We will soon have
both beginning and intermediate language learning materials for all three
of these languages.
Finally, we are creating a free, searchable database of a variety of pictures from these Southeast Asian countries. Users will be able to enter a
few keywords (e.g., “rice fields,” “cities,” and “temples”) and receive a
web page with thumbnail pictures that match the search criteria. Clicking
the thumbnail will deliver a larger version of the picture which users can
save on their own computer.
ORTHOGRAPHY ISSUES
The display of non-Roman orthographies on the web is a complex and
difficult issue. The solution described below, used for the SEAsite supported languages (Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, Burmese, and Khmer), evolved
over the past several years and was constrained by the following requirements:
1. All interactive activities supported for Roman writing systems
(Indonesian and Tagalog) should be equally supported for the
non-Roman systems.
2. Users should be able to view non-Roman script with a minimum
of trouble.
3. Both PC and Macintosh platforms should be supported.
4. Interactive activities should be more flexible than form-based
web pages.
5. It should be practical in order for authors to create large amounts
of content.
The solution we have developed is not conceptually neat nor does it
conform to the emerging Unicode-based standards often advocated. Four
years ago, when SEAsite began, the emerging Unicode techniques were
not widely understood or supported. These standards are still not firmly
in place and multiple display incompatibilities badly complicate L2 script
display. Unicode and related HTML standards may be the future, but the
present is complex and somewhat broken. Our solution is based on two
main ideas: (a) since Southeast Asian languages are alphabetic and contain a limited number of characters, custom fonts are used to display web
page content via the FONT FACE tag; and (b) L2 characters are rendered
in Java applets for interactive exercises.
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We describe our admittedly less than ideal solution in some detail. At
the beginning (1997), custom fonts seemed like a simple way to render
text on web pages. A True Type font, converted to a Macintosh font for
Macintosh users, and the FONT FACE tag was used to specify L2 material. As a result, users have only to download and install the font (a few
mouse clicks) to see the intended results.
However, with new versions of browsers (first Internet Explorer, version 5 and then Netscape, version 6) we found that some L2 characters
would no longer display. In fact, the official HTML specification was designed not to show certain characters of a given font but, rather, to display
HTML-specified characters. Older browser versions did what we wanted
them to do, but newer ones conform (understandably, but inconveniently
from our point of view) to the standard and do what they should do.
Faced with this new (to us) circumstance, we decided on the following
solution. For those languages with more characters than could be displayed in a single font under the standards, we created two fonts—one
with the most commonly used characters, and a second with the least
commonly used characters. Using a web editor such as FrontPage, the
author switches to the second font occasionally when a rare character is
needed. Users now have to download and install two fonts for such a
language.
While this is somewhat awkward, it is not in practice a serious impediment to authoring. Some would argue that L2 characters should simply
never be used to replace Roman letters—an ASCII ‘a’ should always be
some kind of an ‘a’ and should not be a Thai or Khmer letter. Indeed, if
there were a simple and reliable way to avoid this kind of situation, that
argument would have much merit. Perhaps the most serious disadvantage
is the fact that the HTML FONT FACE tag has been “deprecated,” which
means it may not be supported by new browsers in the future. If this were
to happen, it would break all pages supporting this tag, not just in SEAsite,
but in all pages on the web. Thus, it seems unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future. If, however, it were to occur, it would probably be possible
to write an automated program to translate current pages to some new
encoding.
Early on, student interactivity was made a priority for SEAsite. For maximum flexibility, we decided that most such activities would be supported
by Java programs (or applets) which run inside a web page, and several
Java applets were designed to support instruction. Java applets are more
powerful and flexible than HTML page-based JavaScript; however, for
security reasons, applets cannot access fonts on the user’s computer. Therefore some means was needed to present L2 non-Roman script within these
applets.
Fortunately, the basis for such a system was made available on the web
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peared from the web).1 Essentially, a Java “GraphicFont” is created as a
.gif file. The rendering program, given a letter to display, identifies the
part of the graphic that corresponds to the letter and copies it (quickly)
onto the screen. Given this beginning, it was not difficult (in principle) to
extend the idea to Southeast Asian languages. The major addition was to
define and implement custom horizontal positioning of nonspacing characters for each language (i.e., placement of sub- and superscript tones and
vowels and, in some cases, compound characters).
Each of the Java applets used by SEAsite is designed to be data-driven.
That is, the content of the quiz or exercise is typed in by the author and
read by the applet when the quiz is presented. In this way, one applet can
be made to present many quizzes or exercises with different content (and
in different languages). This scheme is necessary when developing large
volumes of material since it is far too labor intensive to create a unique
applet for each exercise.
The system, as it has evolved over the past four years to its present
form, is far from elegant. It is also far from standard with respect to Unicode
and HTML practices and standards. It is somewhat vulnerable to possible
future developments in browsers and standards. Its sole virtue is that at
present it does work well enough for authors of web pages as well as
users.
CONCLUSION
The SEAsite project began with the notion that learning materials for
Southeast Asian studies should include both language and cultural materials. Language materials should be highly interactive and should support
display of the various orthographies of the languages studied. Cultural
materials should be designed primarily in English to attract the largest
possible audience and perhaps motivate some of them to pursue language
and area studies. After four years of development, our web server usage
logs, a user survey form, and unsolicited emails indicate that we have
succeeded.
However, anecdotal reports of this nature are of limited use and generality. It is probably time, now that the web has reached a modicum of
maturity as an instructional medium, to conduct more formal analysis of
its use. We plan to assess in a more formal manner the strengths and
weaknesses of SEAsite materials and of the Internet itself as a learning
medium. Formal surveys of users will gather information on students’ attitudes toward SEAsite and Internet instruction. A second area of research
will focus on conducting studies of language learning itself in which the
Internet is used (almost incidentally) as the medium of instruction. For
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proved comprehension? Does it also lead to improved production? Two
advantages of conducting studies over the Internet are that a larger number of subjects can be included (always a problem for the less commonly
taught languages) and that student responses can be collected in a central
database for convenient analysis. Planning and preparation for both of
these areas of research have begun and will be conducted over the next
two years.
NOTE
1
A complete description of Hughes’ GraphicFont work can be found at
www.seasite.niu.edu/jimstest/GraphicFont/graphic_font_information.htm. The
authors would be pleased to answer any questions or supply code for the Southeast Asian extensions developed for the system described here.
REFERENCES
Brown, H. D. (1994). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language
pedagogy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Regents.
Zimmerman, C. B. (1997). Historical trends in second language vocabulary instruction. In J. Coady & T. Huckin (Eds.), Second Language Vocabulary
Acquisition (pp. 5-19). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
AUTHORS’ BIODATA
George M. Henry (Ed.D., Instructional Technology; M.S., Computer Science, Northern Illinois University) is Associate Professor of computer science at Northern Illinois University. His research interests are in the areas
of CALL and computer processing of Southeast Asian language orthography. He is a project Co-director for SEAsite.
Robert A. Zerwekh (Ph.D., Philosophy, University of Illinois; M.S., Computer Science, Northern Illinois University) is Associate Professor of computer science at Northern Illinois University. His research interests are in
database design and implementation, in conducting education research
via the web, and the web as a learning/instructional medium. He is a project
Co-director for SEAsite.
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AUTHORS’ ADDRESSES
George Henry
Department of Computer Science
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL 60115
Phone: 815/753-6496
Fax:
815/753-0342
Email: henry@cs.niu.edu
Robert Zerwekh
Department of Computer Science
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL 60115
Phone: 815/753-6949
Fax:
815/753-0342
Email: zerwekh@cs.niu.edu
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