Learning a foreign language with hypertext

Data bases are primarily used to provide users with needed information. The information is usually stored in fields, records, and files, and specific commands are used to retrieve the information. A form of electronic information retrieval that is becoming more popular, however, is provided by hypertext.

Hypertext allows its users to navigate a data base more freely, because it is largely free of the constrictions imposed by traditional data bases. Unlike traditional data bases, hypertext stores information in discrete nodes or groups that can be reached from any other node. This is possible because hypertext's author created links within the system. The system links, in turn, allow the user to link anything in the document, including words, phrases, or specified strings in the file. Therefore, navigation within the data base is motivated by the user's mental connections.

As an example of the application of hypertext to a familiar situation, consider the often painstaking process most high school and college students go through to learn a foreign language. Traditionally, students learn a language's grammar rules and vocabulary before they progress to reading blocks of text. Now, a computer system called Transparent Language uses hypertext to enable a beginning foreign language student to read popular text material almost immediately.

This is possible because the software allows students to translate the text as they read. The text is presented at the top of the computer screen, and the student positions the cursor on a line, word, or phrase that he or she wants to translate. The translation, grammatical structure, and verb tense of the selected word or passage appear in a window at the bottom of the screen; therefore, if the reader does not understand a portion of the text, a quick look at the bottom of the screen explains its meaning. The system includes various texts or stories and a linguistic data base for each text. The data base was created by language experts, who entered information at the rate of 5 hours per page, and includes five languages—English, Spanish, French, German, and Latin.

This method of language learning is based on a linguistic theory called "comprehensible input," which proposes that people learn a language better by having repeated encounters with real words in real text, in the same way children learn new words from their parents, than by traditional systems. For example, school administrators traditionally set aside an entire year for high school students and a semester for college students studying Latin to translate the Aeneid; but with the Transparent Language hypertext system, the Aeneid can be read in a few hours.

Source: Daniel J. Lyons, "Program Eases Learning of Foreign Languages," PC Week

LESSON 3

Exercise 3.1

Translate the following words paying attention to affixes.

Doubt, undoubtedly, doubtful, doubtless; invent, invention, inventive, inventor, inventory, inventing; order, in order to, ordered, ordering, disorder; apply, application, applied, applying, misapply, applicable, appliances; count, countable, counting, countless, account, discount, counted; mean, meaning, meaningful, meaningless, meant, means; manage, manager, managing, managed; supply, supplied, supplier, supplies, supplying; produce, production, productive, producer, product, productivity; save, safe, saved, unsafe, saving; assist, assistant, assisted, assisting; suggest, suggestion, suggesting, suggested, suggestive, suggestively; hide, hiding, hidden; success, successful, succeed, succeeding, successfully.

Exercise 3.2

Translate the following paying attention to tenses

1. The project plans to combine a number of different technologies.

2. The projects have been planned to combine...

3. The project is planning to combine …

4. The project is to combine…

5. The project has combined several technologies to…

6. To combine the technologies the project was planned to be…

7. The projects were planned to be combined…

8. The project had to be planned …

9. Had the project been planned carefully, it would be…

10. The projects are planning to combine…

11. We knew the projects had planned to be combined…

12. To be combined the projects planned to…

13. The project plans combine a number of …

14. The project will have been planned by the end of…

15. The projects were being planned …

16. The project planned it would combine…

17. The project had been planned when we decided…

18. The project has been planning to combine these technologies since last month…

19. The project planned carefully will combine all the necessary…

20. The project planned carefully, we’ll manage to combine all the advantages.

Exercise 3.3

Translate the following sentences paying attention to tenses.

1. Computing power in the form of PDAs is coming together with mobile telephony and new players are entering the market.

2. Considerable opportunities will emerge, but reasonable upgrade paths will remain.

3. It’s a separate OS and, like Windows NT2000, is kernel-based, and now consists of about 200 modules.

4. What appears on Pocket PC screen is a version with a user interface designed to resemble the familiar desktop OS, but Windows CE can, and does, appear in a number of different forms, some without any user interface at all, in a wide range of embedded systems.

5. This aspect is key to both Microsoft’s strategy for the product and the considerable potential it holds for developers, despite its continuing low market share in the PDA sector.

6. Virtually the only PDA manufacturer deploying Symbian’s Epoc OS is Psion, and this is being used increasingly on related devices.

7. Bluetooth and other technological developments will eventually lead to a dispersal of PDA/mobile components among far more user-friendly devices such as virtual or folding screens, soft or folding keyboards, pin microphones with automatic transliteration and so on, but in the meantime PDAs and mobile phones are coming together.

8. Purple Software has grown from six employees to around 50 today, which it attributes to the professional approach it takes to development.

9. When you’re developing you don’t need big, bulky functionality that’s going to get in the way of what you are trying to do.

10. Software testing has always been a huge issue for ecommerce developers, and many of them these days are coding using components or objects.

11. IM provides a way to get messages out, and answers in, almost instantly, which, of course means interrupting people.

12. The instrument of that change might be office use, as messaging and presence are being brought into Microsoft’s other office software, such as the Excel spreadsheet program and Outlook e-mail.

13. Researchers at IBM Corp. had for several years been working on the 801 project, an attempt to implement similar ideas.

14. The project was never brought to market, although the ideas influenced later IBM products, including Power PC architecture.

15. Countless other RISK chips have been designed since and RISK is now the dominant architecture for embedded applications.

16. So in the 1980s, several groups around the country, including researchers at Caltech and Intel, were trying to optimize an approach called message passing, which avoids shared memory.

17. China announced in early September that it had been discussing developing an alternative to Microsoft Windows with Japan and South Korea.

18. Worms and viruses have been getting more clever every year and a lot of them these days are having real-world consequences, not because of design, but because of unforeseen interaction with other systems.

Text A

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