mircea

Zeeguu

Almost 20,000 people were enrolled in Danish classes in 2021. At the global level more than 1.2 billion are learning a new language at any given moment.

Zeeguu is a project that aims to support learners of foreign languages accelerate the acquisition of their vocabulary by a three-pronged approach:

  1. Automatically finding relevant materials on the Internet for them
  2. Supporting their reading with translation and pronunciation
  3. Strengthening retention with the use of automatically and personally generated vocabulary exercises

The architecture of Zeeguu includes both a browser extension and a web application that communicate with each other.

Presentations

2022: Can we make learning foreign languages more personalized?

2021: Lessons Learned Developing a Personalized Language Learning System

Papers

As We May Study: Towards the Web as a Personalized Language Textbook - in this paper we introduce the project - we report on a study of using it in a highschool French class in the Netherlands - students are positive about it and take advantage of the opportunity of reading on the topics that they like

Bootstrapping an ubiquitous monitoring ecosystem for accelerating vocabulary acquisition - a paper that presents a generic ecosystem architecture of which Zeeguu is an instantiation

Analyzing user interactions to estimate reading time in web-based L2 reader applications - paper with Nora Hollenstein - we describe how one can estimate reading time on the web when they study free reading in the wild

Reports & Theses

Audio in Digital Learning Environments - a controlled experiment with 22 participants shows that users find zeeguu with audio-focused exercises more fun and increases the likelyhood that they’ll use it in the future

Supporting Foreign Language Learning With a Browser Extension - thesis introducing an architecture for a browser extension for Zeeguu - half of 32 participants prefer the browser extension which cleans up an article page to the original page; the extension also adds interactive translation and pronunciation for reading - the thesis also discusses challenges with maintaining such a browser extension

In Progress

Roadmap

(prioritized)

Open Research Questions

Recently Added