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<Paper uid="W97-0508">
  <Title>A Tutor for Teaching English as a Second Language for Deaf Users of American Sign Language</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This paper briefly overviews a project whose long-term goal is the development of a &amp;quot;writing tutor&amp;quot; for deaf people who use American Sign Language (ASL). We wish to address the particular difficulties faced by the deaf writer learning English and to create a system with the capabilities of accepting input via an essay written by a user (possibly several paragraphs in length), analyzing that essay for errors, and then engaging the user in tutorial dialogue aimed toward improving his/her overall literacy. The goal is a system designed to be used over an extended period of time, with the capacity to model the student's state of language proficiency and changes in that proficiency. The tutoring provided by the system would then be hand-tailored toward the individual user and his/her level of acquisition of written English.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Such a system must have several components.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> First, it must have the ability to analyze the input texts and determine what errors have occurred. It must then be able to select which of these errors to discuss with the learner, and in what order to discuss them. Finally, it must be able to generate appropriate corrective tutorial messages concerning the errors, keeping in mind both the goal of correcting this sample text and the larger objective of improving the overall literary of the student.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Concurrent with these explicit components, the system must be capable of constructing and updating a user model to be consulted in both the selection of errors to be corrected and the generation of corrective text. This user model would take into account a theory of second language acquisition which regards the process as a systematic revision of an internalized concept of the language to be acquired.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Students would be placed within a model of climbing literacy, with language concepts rated as above, below, or within their current realm of acquisition, and the tutorial interaction tailored to this model.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> In this paper, after motivating our specific application, we introduce the architecture of our eventual system and motivate its various components.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> After describing our current implementation status, we motivate the need for a model of second language acquisition. We finish with describing how we propose to model this process.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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