Vidya

Language teaching is one of the domains we have been focussing on in our work on Intelligent Tutoring Systems. We have developed a language teaching shell named Vidya. Vidya is aimed at teaching language to beginners. The objective is to make language learning easy, efficient, effective and interesting for the learner.

Vidya uses the immersion principle and a situational approach to language teaching. The immersion principle says that no language other than the language being taught, should be used (except when the user needs help). Using the situational approach, real-world situations can be used to provide the context for the lessons. Thus, typical situations such as buying a ticket at a train station or asking for street directions can be used to teach dialogue patterns in a language.

Since Vidya has been built as a shell, lessons can be created for specific purposes by the language teacher. The languages which can be currently taught are Hindi and English. Vidya's devanagari (script for Hindi and many other Indian languages) display capability makes it especially useful for teaching Indian languages.