Description:
Reference #: 1693
The University of South Carolina is offering licensing opportunities for Wordification.
Background:
Typical spelling instruction is largely memory based and ineffective for students who need the most help. Teacher training programs for more effective instruction exist but cost $3000-4000 per instructor. Students with different backgrounds and abilities need spelling instruction that is individualized and paced according to their needs. However, there are few resources and little class time for providing individualized instruction. Individualized tutoring is available but, at $50-$100/hour, is quite out of reach for students most likely to need it. Spelling instruction relies on auditory cues, and connections between teachers’ pronunciations and spelling patterns are neither stable nor transparent. Dialect can be a problem, especially when local speech is very distinct from mainstream pronunciations.
Invention Description:
Wordification is a web application designed to teach English literacy (principally spelling) using linguistic principles of mapping between the orthographic and phonetic properties of words. It is an interactive, gamified instructional tool that incorporates targeted spelling tasks, automated assessment, and AI-generated dialect enhancements. The Wordification game suite is designed using the most recent front and back-end libraries. It has over 850 word-objects, each with example sentences, audio from multiple dialects, grade level, and grapheme and phoneme arrays. Wordification allows teachers and administrators to modify the games seen by their students, allowing for customizability for groups of students and individual students according to their skill levels. The application was developed collaboratively by linguists, child education specialists, literacy specialists, and computer scientists, with the goal of effectively teaching phoneme-grapheme recognition and recall to young English learners.
Potential Applications:
Improving English literacy and spelling abilities in underserved populations.
Advantages and Benefits:
The instructional application is interactive in ways that existing English language instructional tools are not. It incorporates dialect-based phonetic awareness in a manner not previously implemented.