From a children's dictionary to a hypermedia laboratory for language learning

Abstract - This paper describes Addizionario, a software tool patented by the National Research Council (CNR.) of Italy, addressed to pre- and primary school children for the study of Italian as native or second language. The different stages of development of the system are described which range from a preliminary phase of collection of children’s data to the implementation of a multimedia Dictionary, to the final stage of a language laboratory in which an Activity Book interacting with the Dictionary has been added to the system. The multilingual version of Addizionario recently developed is used in European Socrates-Comenius projects to foster the learning of a native and foreign language. Furthermore, the particular features of the tool, which is child-centred, open, flexible and easy-to-use, make it suitable not only for normal users, but also for those presenting learning difficulties linked to physical or cognitive impairment. Keywords - hypermedia, children’s dictionaries, creativity, language learning, impairment 1. INTRODUCTION This paper describes the most interesting features of Addizionario, an integrated set of tools designed to support pre- and primary school children in the study of Italian as native or as second language at various levels of difficulty and from various points of view. The software, implemented at the Institute of Computational Linguistics (ILC) in Pisa, in collaboration with the Department of Computer Sciences of Turin University, and patented by the Italian National Research Council (CNR) of Italy, reflects the ideas that the ILC group Language Teaching and Information Technologies involved in the study and implementation of information tools for language teaching, has expressed over the last decade.