Abstract:

Smart-phones and tablet computers are greatly useful and mobile devices which are rapidly developing at the very present time. These mobile devices are used for, in addition to numerous kinds of internet transactions, leisure activities and entertaining online / offline games, especially by youngsters. Developing technologies and some games which use these technologies may affect students’ vocabulary (Turkish vocabulary in the context of this study) and pronunciation learning. The purpose of the study is to develop an offline software architecture which can enable the students to learn the Turkish words, their meanings, the semantic relations between them such as synonymy and antonymy, through entertaining games running on mobile operating systems; and to enable researchers to gain insight about how people make inferences about a word when they first see it via free connotation information. In this way, it is thought that this study would provide support for the linguistic and intellectual development of students, by enabling them to understand and use Turkish correctly and appropriately; and would enable the students to be raised as social individuals by increasing social interaction in a technology-driven classroom.

Various word games, including finding the synonyms and antonyms of words or completing the missing letters in a word, have been produced using limited word lists, but these software require an internet connection. The software architecture to be developed in this study will use the Synonym and Antonym dictionaries prepared for the Turkish Language Association by Dokuz Eylül University Natural Language Processing Work Group, thus thorough and validated word lists will be used. The software will aim at teaching Turkish vocabulary, with synonyms, antonyms and related words, via an entertaining activity. In this software, randomly selected words will appear on the screen and the user would enter the first word that comes into the mind and the system will grade the response according to the semantic relations defined in the software. At the end of one turn, all semantically related words, their meanings and even cliparts depicting the words will be presented to the user.The responses by the users will be stored enabling the software to conduct some statistical analyses on them and therefore to reveal the intellectual statuses and development of the users. At the end of the session, the user will be requested to approve the submission of the responses to the main system; and if approved the data will be submitted to the main database.

The software to be developed will be coded by the software development kits running on Windows and iOS operating system; and will be designed in such a way that it would enable running offline on mobile operating systems (Android, iOS and Windows Mobile), and sending data to the internet at the end of the session if approved. The cross platform property of the software will enable it to run on both tablet pcs and smart-phones and thus attracting the youngsters, who always wish to have the latest technology devices, to play the game and learn at the same time, wherevere they are. It is expected that the study would contribute to the efforts towards increasing literacy and technology literacy.

Keywords:

Vocabulary, semantic relations, mobile applications, educational software.