Researchers at the Meraka Institute of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) have released a spelling game in all 11 official South African languages. The game, OpenSpell, can be localised for additional languages.
OpenSpell is the inspiration of visiting researcher and linguist Dr Madelaine Plauche, who has been working in the human language technologies (HLT) research group.
“Although computers are made available in rural areas and small community centres worldwide, it has become apparent that almost no local language software exists,” she says.
Plauche was responsible for the design and content list and used the expertise of her colleagues in the HLT group for programming, multimedia and diarisation (cleaning out noise from recordings). She set up consultations with 10 primary school educators in Gauteng to identify the first words in each language. Recordings of letters were made using the voice talents of CSIR staff.
OpenSpell is available for downloading at http://madwiki.icsi,berkeley.edu/madwiki and comprises two parts: a simple, interactive, computer-based activity that can be set at three levels (easy, medium and hard) and an editor that allows a tutor to edit the keyboard and record sounds.
“Anyone can use the software to customise it to a language or dialect,” Plauche says. Feedback to learners is in the form of rewards or penalties.
The software was released under a Gnu General Public Licence (GPL). GPL is the most popular and well-known example of the type of strong “copyleft” licence that requires derived works to be available under the same copyleft.
Copyleft is a play on the word copyright and describes the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others. It also requires that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions.
Plauche is delighted to see this project come to fruition in South Africa. “I see it as a valuable tool in working towards an equitable spread of software support for non-dominant languages.” Educators can incorporate the tool to help learners with regular spelling tasks.