KDEEdu/Language/Personas
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Personas for Language Learning
We use Personas to define the scope and target audience for our applications. The following personas specifically apply to language learning applications. Since learning is a continuous process where we expect a user to become more proficient, we use the following approach
- a Persona defines the characteristics of a user group
- the proficiency level of a user is denoted by A, B, and C, which corresponds to the CEF competence levels: Common European Framework of Reference for Languages
Notes about Personas in General
Personas is an established usability practice. Personas should represent the different user types. As such they are an useful tool: They help the designers to step out of their own shoes to figure out users' goals, preferences, limitations and behavior.
A Persona description should consist of behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and also a description of environment of use. A realistic description brings the persona to life and opens different views to the designer: For example two different personas might approach the same problem from a different angle and probably they would use different ways of action to achieve the same goal. So the same use cases should be possible to do in different ways, depending on the personas skills, behaviour patterns etc.
Language Learning Personas
Tina, the Professional
Characteristics:
- very motivated to learn a new language (e.g. for job)
- also requires very specialized vocabulary
Story: Tina is a professional in the IT industry and she works for a big international company. In her job she has to work at projects with different international partners. Tina is quite interested in languages and already speaks some, though at different competence levels (English C2, French B1, Spanish B2). Now she is starting to learn Greek as soon she will be project lead for an important project with a Greek partner company.
Gan, the Hobby Learner
Somebody who has time to learn a language and does so, since she/he maybe wants to be able to speak basic phrases in the next holidays
- just retired
- goal is enjoy learning a language, wants to be able to have simple conversations in target language
Camille, the Student
Characteristics:
- has to fulfill demands of teachers and pass exams
- gets homeworks form teacher
- gets vocabulary list
Story: Camille is a French girl, 14 years old and still goes to school. She is currently in the 6th grade and learns English since two years now. Besides the regular vocabulary lists to memorize and homework exercises to complete, she got a really good teacher who encourages his students to get more familiar to the language. The teacher provides vocabulary lists in a standard format while Camille's English books only have "phase6"-format files. Camille likes to train her English skills by listening to English radio, reading English texts and training her pronunciation.
Others
There are more possible target groups (e.g. learning in class) but currently out of scope.
Proficiency Levels
We define a coarse set of CEFR inspired levels. A level describes what a learner is supposed to be able to do in reading, listening, speaking and writing.
0: Starter
- nothing expected