A Mobile Vocabulary Acquisition Application for Health Science Students: a Proposed Study Ilana Wilken 1 , Febe de Wet 1 & Elsab´ e Taljard 2 1 Human Language Technology Research Group, Meraka Institute, CSIR, Pretoria, South Africa 2 Department of African Languages, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa IWilken@csir.co.za, FDWet@csir.co.za, Elsabe.Taljard@up.ac.za Abstract Communication plays a vital role in everyday life and in some situations multilingual communication is a necessity. The South African constitution recognises 11 official languages. Multilin- gual communication therefore occurs almost everywhere, like at hospitals and in clinics. When the need arises for someone (who does not speak a global language like English) to seek medical attention in South Africa, it becomes a challenge to find a health practitioner that speaks their first language. This study aims to develop and evaluate the use of a mobile application designed for supplementary Northern Sotho language learning by health science students. Index Terms: mobile-assisted language learning, human- computer interaction, user experience 1. Introduction South Africa is home to eleven official languages and although it is expected of medical professionals to communicate in the languages of the area where they work [1] few of them do [2]. Communication barriers and the associated challenges experi- enced by health professionals are widely documented in South Africa’s health care sector [3, 4, 5, 6]. Health professionals hardly ever speak their patients’ first languages. This commu- nication barrier is especially problematic in the rural communi- ties of South Africa [7]. Medical students often start working in areas other than those they grew up in, so they have to learn another language to function in professionally, and this is some- times challenging [1]. Language acquisition consists of three language subsys- tems: grammar, phonology and vocabulary [8]. Even though vocabulary is of vital importance in language acquisition, teach- ers often neglect it and rather focus on grammar and phonology [8]. It has been claimed that there is an increased chance of communicating in a foreign or second language if the speaker knows well-chosen basic vocabulary in the target language than when they have mastered the language’s grammar [8]. This is especially true of communication in a specific domain. The do- main in which a medical practitioner and a patient find them- selves in, adjusts the size of the vocabulary to that which is relevant for the situation. For example, when discussing a pa- tient’s broken leg, the only vocabulary the health professional will need is vocabulary relating to the patient’s leg and the pro- cedures around it. The language learning issue is addressed to some extent by South African universities through teaching health science students an additional language. Mobile applications can be seen as extensions for learning in new and different environments and this in turn allows lan- guage acquisition not to be limited to the classroom [9]. This can be a big advantage for busy students who can use portable devices to learn whenever they have free time available [9]. Mo- bile applications combine different elements to achieve the goal of supplementing traditional learning methods. Two of these el- ements are addressed in this study: 1) mobile assisted language learning and 2) human language technologies. 1.1. Mobile assisted language learning Mobile assisted language learning (MALL) is a subarea of mo- bile learning (mLearning) [10]. Even though scholars are not in agreement about whether mobile means the mobility of the technologies or the mobility of the learner, it is often stressed that it refers to the mobility of the learning content [11]. Com- puter assisted language learning (CALL) on the other hand takes place when students or learners use computers during a language course [12]. Although many commonalities between MALL and CALL are observed, it has to be noted that there is a difference between the two. MALL differs from CALL because it can be used in personal and portable devices and it enables students or learners to learn in new and spontaneous ways [11]. 1.2. Human Language Technologies Human language technologies (HLTs) have the goal of getting computers to perform useful tasks involving human language [13]. Two of these tasks include improving human-human com- munication and the processing of text or speech [13]. Text- to-speech synthesis (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) are two elements of HLT that are relevant to this study. TTS systems automatically generate speech from text input [14] and ASR systems recognise the user’s speech and responds ac- cordingly [15]. HLT is used within MALL programmes to enhance the technology and offers learners an environment in which they can use multi-media to learn a new language. South Africa’s languages can all be regarded as being under-resourced in terms of developing HLTs [16]. Even South African English can be classified as an under-resourced accent of English [17]. The situation is much worse for the indigenous languages that cannot leverage on existing resources in other languages [17]. A special effort has therefore been made to col- lect resources and to develop basic HLTs for all 11 languages [18, 19]. The ASR and TTS systems developed for Northern Sotho are used in this study. LTLT-2015, Leipzig, Germany, September 4 20 ISCA Archive http://www.isca-speech.org/archive Language Teaching, Learning and Technology (LTLT-2015) Leipzig, Germany September 4, 2015