Enhancing Hungarian students’ English language skills on the basis of literary texts in the three-dimensional space

Abstract

In our paper we introduce a bilingual language learning material developed in the framework of the so-called three dimensional virtual library model (3DVLM). This model inspired by the history and organization of the famous ancient Library of Alexandria forms the basis of the virtual library project which started about eight years ago as part of the Cognitive Infocommunications (CogInfoCom) research. The current version of the 3DVLM uses the excellent 3D features of the MaxWhere Seminar System which makes it suitable for both individual learning and classroom use. In the following, we would like to introduce first the basic framework of our development, then describe in detail the data structure and organization of the developed bilingual language learning material. The basic idea of the material is to present selected phrases and contexts from classical literary works in English and from their parallel translations in Hungarian in order to improve both the language skills and background knowledge of Hungarian language learners at an advanced level. We found that using web technology was especially useful for developing the language learning material and the developed hypertext structure formed a scale-free network of interconnected nodes.