A Web-based tool for distance learning of foreign languages

A Web-based distance learning tool that assists the learning of a new foreign language is presented. The tool speeds up the learning of a new language, for example, English or Spanish as a foreign language. It searches for preselected words and relationships among those words in a foreign language article of arbitrary length and displays them in a hyperlink format in a generated Web page. There are three types of potential users of this tool. The first type is an instructor of the language, who can use Web pages generated by the tool as supplemental materials for the instructions. Students can access the Web pages through Web browsers from anywhere in the world. The second type of user is a self-learner, who can pick up new words and article of interests, and find how these new words are used in the article. The third type of user is a language researcher, who can study patterns of words in articles; for example, how does a particular author habitually use certain patterns of words. This paper concentrates on users of the first two types. This software tool is applicable to Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. In this paper, we present examples in English and Spanish.