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The idea for my language tool came out of a discussion I had with Bakhtiar Mikhak about a very positive experience he had learning grammar in elementary school. Whereas other teachers of his had taught grammar by introducing a rule and then providing concocted examples of how that rule might apply, this teacher had the children choose a book they liked to read. The class then read through the book together, dissecting each sentence to understand how it worked-what part of speech each word was and how they fit together to form a sentence. Bakhtiar felt that this was a much more meaningful learning experience because the students were working with something that has personal meaning to them. After analyzing how the sentences in the book worked, the class would then use the words that they had learned to construct their own sentences, observing the rules that they had uncovered in action.

This got me thinking about how a technological space could assist in this learning process while still allowing the user the freedom to construct their own personal learning framework. The result is below as a Macromedia Director project, packaged in shockwave for the web. You use it by typing a sentence (preferably without punctuation) into the box at the bottom of the program and clicking "Go!" The words you typed will appear to the right of the button. You can they move them around on the screen and move them through the paint cans to color them.

need the shockwave for director plugin? get it here

As I developed the idea for this project, I realized that the tool could have much wider applications than learning grammar. In fact, it can simply be a general tool for toying with making sentences out of individual words and visually grouping those words into categories. Poets sometimes use this sort of "magnetic poetry" as a playful brainstorming technique for surmounting the cursed "writer's block." Using my tool, a poet might create such categories as "explosive," "quiet," "boring," and so on for his or her words. A similar use might be for an advertising executive trying to come up with a catchy slogan for a new product.

After creating the tool in its current form, I showed it to Bakhtiar. He liked the idea and even expressed interest in having his children use it as a way to explore parts of speech, but he felt that it would be a better tool for learning the parts of speech and sentence structure if it provided some automatic means of determining if the words had been properly categorized or if a sentence had been correctly constructed. As the tools stands now, it allows for any categorization of words, leaving the burden of getting it right solely on the user.

Though there are some limitations to how effective such automatic processing could be (since as I just used the tool such that I had to change "love" from a verb to a noun as I was using it,) I think that these enhancements could be very beneficial to this learning process, but here I run into what I described to Bakhtiar as an "identity crisis" on the part of the tool; it is not clearly intended to act as a learning experience (despite the fact that the default categories are parts of speech) but instead provides a technologically-enhanced workspace for the user to explore relationships between words. Perhaps it would be appropriate to have a way to lock the tool into "grammar mode" so that the categories could not be changed and the program could provide feedback about the correctness of the user's selections, perhaps by un-coloring words which were incorrectly categorized. However, I would want to be very careful to avoid restricting the types of explorations which would be possible with the tool.

Some interesting aspects of the way that this tool looks at language include the notion that language is written, as there are no audio components to the tool. The tool also has the effect of making the use and construction of language spatial, and also adds the further dimension of color as a means of differentiating between words. The tool also clearly sees the unit of language as the word, both in meaning and as it is used as an educational tool to understand parts of speech and sentence structure. The use of the tool as a brainstorming device also makes the interesting assumption that ideas can come through manipulation of elements of language.

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