Enhancing Instruction of Written East Asian Languages with Sketch Recognition-Based 'Intelligent Language Workbook' Interfaces

For American higher education students studying one of the major East Asian languages in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) as a second language, one of the major challenges that students face is the mastery of the various written scripts due to those languages’ vast contrasts from written English. Conventional pedagogical resources for written CJK languages frequently rely on language instructors, who provide in-class demonstrations of the written scripts and real-time assessment of their students’ written input: paper workbooks, which offer guided instructional drills and supplementary knowledge on the written component; and practice sheets, which enable students to absorb components of the written scripts through repetitious writing practice. Unfortunately, these techniques also present their own inherent disadvantages: language instructors are constrained by time in teaching the written components to students for typical classroom sizes, workbooks are static instructional materials that lack real-time intelligent feedback and assessment, and practice sheets result in monotonous practice to students and are vulnerable to students erroneously practicing potential mistakes repeatedly if left unsupervised.