iPlayAStory: A Language Learning Platform for Interactive Story-Telling

Abstract

Edutainment is a neologism that combines education and entertainment. It has been found to promote learning in a fun and interesting environment. Edutainment applications covered several fields including language learning. However, applications that focused on reading in language learning suffered from some limitations. These limitations include low interactivity and the lack of users’ reading assessment. In this paper, we will introduce iPlayAStory; an interactive online educational platform for language learning. iPlayAStory provides children with an entertaining application where they can read sentences aloud. The system then assesses the correctness of the children’s reading. Children are provided with feedback and can listen to the correct pronunciation. Moreover, iPlayAStory provides parents and teachers with a clear profile for their children’s performance on the application. Parents and teachers could also record stories with their voice to be played back for their children. iPlayAStory also serves as a platform for speech acquisition. The collected speech data could later be used to build an Automatic Speech Recognition system for detailed assessment of children’s pronunciation.