The boy jumps: Automorphology on the ProLoQuo2Go

Jman has some reading books that were originally developed for deaf kids and are also useful for helping teach kids with language delays or disorders how to read. Now, Jman already can read quite a bit, and write quite a bit as well, but it's still very "Jman-ish." I was interested in these books not for teaching Jman to read, but for helping Jman to slowly master language. Rather than being phonics based books, as is typical with beginning readers, these books instead introduce reading through one syntactical language structure at a time. For example, in the first book every sentence of every story is ONLY of the form subject + verb, and in particular the verbs are limited to singular present tense intransitive verb forms (verbs that do not take a direct object, eg, jumps or runs: The boy jumps. The girl runs.) There are other advantages to this reading book series. You can read all about it here: Reading Milestones.

Now let me tell you a little about a really awesome feature of ProLoQuo2Go. In ProLoQuo2Go, you can identify each button/word by its part of speech, indicated by the color of the border around the button. Nouns have a yellow border, verbs have a pink border, adjectives have a blue border, etc. Here's what's really awesome, though. If you have a button for "boy" and just press the button, it will pop up as "boy" in the message window. However, if you hold that button down for just a little while (you can change the duration required--we have it at .5 sec), a small window of choices will pop up for you that automatically offer you different versions of "boy": boy, boys, boy's, or boys' (singular, plural, singular possessive, and plural possessive, respectively). With one button, you quickly and easily have all those options available, without having to navigate to other pages or do fancy things or have a bunch of extra buttons cluttering up your pages.

Even cooler, IMO, is the automorphology ir auto-conjugation of the verbs. If you hold down the button for "see," it will give you the following choices: see, sees, saw, will see, seeing, seen. How cool is that?!??!? I do have one wish, though, and that is that it would also offer the infinitive "to see." But hey, the English major in me would find something to complain about!

So, recently we pulled Jman's Red Reading Milestones books back out with the intentions of 'reading' them via the ProLoQuo2Go. He was already very familiar with the first story about a boy who jumps a variety of obstacles to get back home. As we turned the pages, I demonstrated to Jman how to punch in the words on the page: "The boy" (programmed in as one button for the purposes of this lesson) and "jumps." Jman's initial attempts were to simply push 'jump' and be done with it, but that says, "The boy jump," which of course is 'bad English.' I demonstrated for him instead that when you hold the 'jump' button down, you get choices. Then I chose 'jumps.' He wasn't terribly impressed. We continued on.

We read through the first story the first day, with me doing a lot of Guided Demonstration on how to choose "jumps" instead of "jump." The next day, we read the same story, and Jman would hold the button down for choices, but he would be as likely to still choose "jump" as "jumps." We went ahead and read story two as well, adding in a new verb, "runs." Jman began to correct himself sometimes if he chose the wrong verb form, but he was very unreliable. However, he was very engaged and definitely trying to figure out the pattern of what we were doing.

Fast forward a couple days to yesterday afternoon. We only read the first story, but Jman was all over it this time. He read the page and entered "The boy." Then he'd pause as he pushed and held down "jump" waiting for the choices to apeear. He'd look up at me eagerly, with that crooked half grin of his, giving a little bitty nod, and then he'd quickly look back down and choose "jumps," perhaps followed by a verbal "all right!" from him. Was he excited because he was learning something, or because he was anticipating getting the computer that much more quickly? I don't know, but I know that we are making progress. The automorphology feature of ProLoQuo2Go should be absolutely fantastic for helping someone who has language learning issues to experience more success more quickly with less pain. I'm sorry I don't have pictures for you, but you can watch some great demonstration videos at the ProLoQuo2Go website. You can see the auto-conjugation of verbs in video 4 (intro to vocabulary part 3).