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‘The way language is used in real life’: Lectica language app engages users with culture
2/10/22

The University of Maryland National Foreign Language Center released Lectica — a free language learning app — last year that engages users in language and culture simultaneously.

Lectica currently offers a total of 420 lessons across seven languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, Korean, Persian, Russian and Spanish. All lessons and content were prepared by native speakers, said Connie DiJohnson, the NFLC’s director of Second Language Acquisition.

Many language learning apps on the market feel like a game, DiJohnson said, where they max out at a certain level and don’t delve into how native speakers use language.

Lectica’s curriculum is designed, created and written by native speakers using authentic content, passages and texts so people using the app can engage with the language they are learning, the way native speakers do, DiJohnson said.

For example, you can learn fashion tips in Persian, how to make Lanzhou beef noodle soup in Chinese, safety rules for riding scooters in French, how to read a job posting in Arabic, learn about National Tango Day in Spanish, K-pop group BTS in Korean and what it’s like buying an apartment in Russian.

“This is the way the language is used in real life,” she said.

To create an app that closely resembles how languages are used in real life, the NFLC had help from target language faculty members and Second Language Acquisition Specialists.

A target language faculty member is a native speaker of a particular language with a background in language learning. A Second Language Acquisition Specialist is a faculty member with an expertise in developing materials and assessments for language learning, DiJohnson said.

These faculty members worked together to create lesson plans that were both perfectly leveled for different abilities, but also culturally engaging, DiJohnson said.

“There’s usually a culture or cultures that go along with the language, and if you’re just learning the structure of the language or, you know, copying a routine dialogue in a textbook or something like that, you’re sort of missing out on the culture,” Rebecca Rubin Damari, director of research at the NFLC said. “The culture is really built into the language learning so you’re getting both at the same time.”

There’s also a common misconception that being bilingual only matters for service sector jobs or intelligence and security jobs, Damari said. However, research shows bilingual employees are needed in a variety of jobs, she said.

“It can make you so much more competitive in the job market regardless of what your career goals are,” Damari said.

Damari said the NFLC is now working on outreach to language programs at this and other universities to spread the word about Lectica. She also said faculty in the NFLC and school of Languages, Literatures and Cultures have shown interest in incorporating Lectica as a supplemental resource into their courses.

The NFLC also had help from RedBlack, a student consulting group part of the university’s chapter of the American Marketing Association.

Senior marketing major Faith Chisholm, a previous RedBlack consulting account manager for NFLC, said her three person team helped with defining a target market, social media marketing, recommending improvements for the app prototype and coming up with a name for the app.

The name Lectica uses the Latin root ‘lect’, meaning read or readable, Chisholm said.

“This name really worked well … because we wanted it to be related to reading skills since this is something that [Lectica] focuses on,” Chisholm said.

Megan Jeffrey, director of Strategic Initiatives and Communication at the NFLC and a language learner herself, said her favorite thing about Lectica is the cultural context it provides.

“[Lectica is] really very thorough. I haven’t seen anything on the market for this,” Jeffrey said.

Lectica is currently available on the Apple App Store and will be available on Google Play in the summer 2022, Jeffrey said. NFLC plans to make 12 more languages available on the app soon, she said.

“Our mission really is to help people learn about each other and the world around them,” Jeffrey said. “There’s so much diversity in the world and that should be celebrated. And through language is how we usually do that.”

Researcher Studies What’s Behind Baby Talk
11/15/21

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Anyone who’s ever tried having a conversation with a 1-year-old knows it can feel like very little is getting through. But according to linguistics Professor Jeffrey Lidz, there’s plenty going on behind the adorable babble and occasional slobbering.

For the past two decades, Lidz has focused on behind-the-scenes action in the youngest human minds, seeking to discern how and when infants begin to understand things like sentence structure or the difference between a noun and a verb.

Lidz co-authored—with Laurel Perkins Ph.D ’19, now an assistant professor at UCLA—a groundbreaking study published last month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that syntax, or the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences, actively develops during the second year of life. According to the researchers, 18-month-olds have developed syntax capacities on par with adults.

We recently spoke with Lidz, who is also the director of the University of Maryland Project on Children's Language Learning and one of the founders of the Infant and Child Studies Consortium, about his latest discovery and what it’s like to conduct research into the mysteries of baby talk.

When did you begin researching language in kids?
In the last year of my Ph.D., I took a course on language acquisition, which I thought was really cool. I had some questions about how that research worked, and I managed to get a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. So, I started researching syntax and semantics in 3- and 4-year-olds, and the thing I kept finding was that for almost every phenomenon I looked at, children had a really sophisticated knowledge of their language—even though they didn’t speak super fluently. So, the question that was driving me was: How did they get there? Language is a really, really complicated mental construct. It almost seems like an impossible task to figure out how children acquire all that knowledge.

You’ve been at the forefront of making discoveries about syntactic abilities in young children. How does your recent paper fit into the trajectory of your research?
Before the early 2000s, nobody was really studying the syntax of children between 1 and 2 because they thought there wasn’t anything to study because kids that age don’t talk much. But sometimes what kids say is a reflection of what they know, and sometimes what they say is much less than what they know because it’s hard to coordinate a long expression. By 18 months, kids understand that sentences are hierarchically structured, even though you can’t see that in their productions. We found that kids know about grammatical categories like the difference between nouns and verbs, between 16 and 18 months. This most recent paper is about a central feature of language structure, which is the ability to create dependency between words in a sentence that are far away from each other. Discovering that kids can do those computations by the time they’re 18 months is new and exciting.

How do you manage to get babies to cooperate for research studies?
It’s fun—and it’s a challenge. We try and make the lab environment an interesting place to be, and we spend a fair amount of time at the beginning of a study playing with toys, making the children feel comfortable and getting them accustomed to the environment so that when we want to take them into the room to do the study, they’re happy to go with us and interested to see what’s there. We want to make the lab feel like a mix between a dentist’s office and a preschool. In the dentist’s office everything works the way it’s supposed to work and you feel like you’re in the hands of total professionals. But we also want it to be a place that’s fun, where the kid feels happy and so do the parents. If the kids are not feeling comfortable and safe, the experiments are just not gonna work.

Are there things parents can do to help their own kids’ language development?
When my kids were little, we would play with them and figure out ways to probe what they understood. I think playing with your kids linguistically is a fun thing to do, like by seeing how they react when something is ungrammatical. You’ll learn a lot about how sophisticated their knowledge is. But I don’t think parents need to worry, generally, about language development. Children are aggressive learners, and they’re motivated to learn language because they're trying to be understood and they’re trying to understand the world around them.

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Photo: Linguistics Professor Jeff Lidz talks about adjectives with an aspiring child scientist at Family Science Days at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in 2016. Lidz is co-author of a groundbreaking new study about how children learn syntax in language.

Photo courtesy of Maryland Language Science Center

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