Extensive Reading with Guidance

A language learning mode called “word-focused extensive reading” has been proposed to facilitate word-usage learning. The user inputs a word in the computer program designed and implemented for reading to find its usage in the context of a sentence. The computer program then searches for the knowledge base for the word and provides guidance to show a summary of the salient features of word collocation. Sentences with the word in question are displayed one at a time. For each sentence the relevant collocating words are highlighted. In this way the reader sees the word collocation so as to recognize the salient features of the word and thus incrementally acquires the knowledge of word usage. The program works with large Chinese and English collections of texts. For Chinese the knowledge of word collocation was built on the basis of the Balanced Corpus of Academia Sinica. The English collocation features were collected from the British National Corpus. The program can also be useful for learning to differentiate near-synonyms.