John W. Kowalski

I am a research programmer at Carnegie Mellon developing web applications primarily for the analysis of second language acquisition. I use statistical and machine learning techniques to uncover fundamental principles of second language acquisition and build freely-available tools based on these discoveries to aid learning a second language quickly and effectively.

Education

Current Projects

Pinyin Tutor

For beginning students of Chinese, simply spelling a spoken Chinese phrase can be challenging. The Pinyin Tutor is designed to help improve this fundamental skill. Students using the Pinyin Tutor have shown significant improvement from pre to post test and the tutor has since been used by thousands of students at over thirty institutions around the world.

Jyutping Tutor

Like the Pinyin Tutor, the more recent Jyutping Tutor also aims to help students improve Chinese listening and spelling skills. But while the Pinyin Tutor helps students improve Mandarin Chinese, the Jyutping Tutor helps strengthen this skill for Cantonese.

English Article Tutor

The English Article Tutor is designed to help students learning English as a second language master the articles: "a" / "an", "the", (or if no article should be used). While native English speakers may be unaware of the complexity of rules governing proper article usage, the great many students whose native language does not have articles can find this skill very difficult to master. Students using the English Article Tutor have shown significant improvement pre to post test at properly using the English articles.

Multilingual Vocabulary Builder

This is a new project and developement is in progress. This work will use the wealth of resources available on Wiktionary to aid robust learning of vocabulary. I'll post more details on this work in the near future.

Some other programs I've developed...

Previous Collaborations

Publications

Conference Presentations

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