Neat: our Tactical Language project was featured on slashdot this morning.
The main link in the article pointed to a journal paper written by Ravi Purushotma, documenting his vision of customizing The Sims to teach German. From reading his paper (and his updates to the paper), it is unclear if this Sims system is more vapor-/concept-ware or an actual implemented system, but it looks interesting. I’m not sure how pedagogically effective it could be, though. The Sims certainly a good motivator that will encourage learners to use the software, but is the vocabulary that the learner is exposed to going to be useful beyond the game environment?
This is one thing that working on TactLang has really impressed upon me: the user does not have an infinite amount of time, especially not to spend on any language teaching program that you might want to develop. If we’re trying to give the learner basic language functionality through a scant 80 hours of teaching, we’d better be very intentional about what we do/don’t include in our curriculum, and very confident that our AI-driven pedagogical feedback is as effective as possible.
And, as an aside: also mentioned in the article is a link to MIT’s SCILL, which focuses on computer aided language pedagogy for Mandarin Chinese. I saw these guys back in Venice at the InSTIL conference last summertime–very promising stuff they have. We were originally thinking of focusing on Chinese as a target language for TactLang, but speech recognition over a tonal language was a headache we didn’t want to worry about =p.