A design case study of a tangible system supporting young English language learners

Many researchers have suggested that tangible user interfaces (TUIs) have the potential to support learning for children. While several tangible reading systems have been developed for children, few systems have been designed that explicitly target the first stage of reading where many children struggle, which is the alphabetic principle (letter-sound correspondences). We present a tangible reading system called PhonoBlocks that supports children learning English letter-sound correspondences. PhonoBlocks uses 3D tangible letters that change colour to draw attention to the moment that adding other letters changes the sounds. We then present a mixed-methods case study with ten Mandarin-speaking children in China using our system. Results showed that the Chinese children achieved significant learning gains relative to their baseline performance after PhonoBlocks instruction. The results also point to design features of our system that enabled behaviours that are correlated with learning. We compare the results of this study to a different study with eight at-risk monolingual English-speaking children in Canada using PhonoBlocks in learning to read and spell. By comparing results, we generalize and make three recommendations for designing tangible reading systems for all children who must learn the alphabetic principle. We also discuss three recommendations that are specifically for children learning English as a foreign language.