The goal of the tecWAVE project is to develop and test a web application that provides middle school students with explicit scaffolding for word learning through multimedia multilingual word annotation.
When too many words are unknown in a text, comprehension suffers. tecWAVE takes advantage of the Internet to provide "in the moment" vocabulary assistance for struggling readers.
In tecWAVE, academic texts are input into the system and, as students read through the text, certain words are highlighted allowing students to click on them. The highlighted words are selected by the application based upon a variety of factors including age, reading level, and native language.
When the student clicks on a word, a pop-up window displays several definitions of the word along with several pictures the system associates with the word. The pop-up definitions are presented in both the student's native language and in English.
We believe that explicit scaffolding for vocabulary learning through tecWAVE has the potential to help develop students’ word knowledge and comprehension of text. This technology, while of use to all readers, could prove particularly useful for English language learners.