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Science

How research informs YAKKI

YAKKI teaches English to children who do not have English at home. Its games and learning formats are informed by published research on how a second language is learned, how children learn to read, how memory works, how people communicate, and what accessibility requires.

Research informs our design. It does not mean that the authors of the work cited here endorse, review or collaborate with YAKKI.

What this means in practice

The learning content is in English. Instructions, hints and feedback on answers can appear in an available interface language, so the child understands the task. Lessons are assigned by the adult who leads the child, together with their CEFR level, and the child does not choose those lessons; otherwise the child opens a lesson built for their level.

Ten pillars at a glance

  1. Words are learned by using them — Available Now
  2. Recall first, then see the answer — Available Now · bringing weak items back later: In Development
  3. Building on the home language — Available Now · more such games: In Development
  4. Reading is taught explicitly — Available Now
  5. Understand, then answer — Available Now · difficulty adjusted to each child: In Development
  6. Practice without fear of mistakes — Available Now
  7. Saying it the right way — Available Now
  8. Dyslexia accessibility — In Development · the mode will be free
  9. The next step comes from practice — In Development
  10. Being understood comes first — Available Now

1. Words are learned by using them

A word sticks better when a child has to recall it, choose it among similar options or use it in a sentence of their own. So vocabulary games combine recognition, recall and the child’s own answer. Hebrew speakers have a known difficulty: they tend to avoid English phrasal verbs rather than misuse them.

Available Now vocabulary games, including dedicated formats for phrasal verbs and collocations. Texts are marked with CEFR levels.

We do not yet check a text’s words against what a particular child already knows.

Sources: Laufer & Hulstijn (2001) · Nation (2001) · Dagut & Laufer (1985)

2. Recall first, then see the answer

Recalling an answer yourself does more for memory than reading it again. Spacing the recalls further apart each time makes the memory last.

Available Now in recall games the child answers before seeing the answer.

In Development a learner model that notices weak items and brings them back later, in a different game.

Sources: Roediger & Karpicke (2006) · Roediger & Butler (2011) · Karpicke (2017) · Pimsleur (1967) · Settles & Meeder (2016)

3. Building on the home language

Children who speak Hebrew, Arabic or Russian make different mistakes in English: Hebrew has only a definite article, Russian has no articles at all. The home language is an asset, not an obstacle — it helps the child understand, without replacing the English.

Available Now the interface in an available home language; some games are built for the child’s language — for example, False Friends for a Russian speaker uses Russian–English pairs.

In Development the same approach in more games.

Sources: Lado (1957) · Cummins (1979) · Jarvis & Pavlenko (2008) · Kellerman (1983)

4. Reading is taught explicitly

In English, a letter does not reliably tell you the sound. A child who reads pointed Hebrew or Arabic faces a different decoding task from an English-speaking child. So letter–sound links, decoding and word recognition are practised as skills in their own right, not assumed.

Available Now sound and letter training for beginners.

In Development a learner model that uses ordinary practice to suggest the next task.

Sources: Share (1995) · Katz & Frost (1992) · Bar-On & Share (2018) · Kahn-Horwitz, Schwartz & Share (2011) · Saiegh-Haddad & Geva (2008) · Ehri (2005)

5. Understand, then answer

Children need English they can mostly understand, pitched a little above their level. They also need to say or write something themselves — that is how gaps show up. And they need feedback on what they produced.

Available Now an assigned lesson has a CEFR level set by the adult who assigns it, and the content is built for that level; games ask for written and spoken answers; free answers get feedback. One game gives help in steps, through a ladder of hints.

In Development automatic adjustment of difficulty for each child.

In method, YAKKI is closest to the Direct Method — it has its own page. This is a choice about how lessons are built, not a claim that one method is proven better than the others.

Sources: Krashen (1982) · Swain (1985) · Long (1996) · Vygotsky (1978)

6. Practice without fear of mistakes

Speaking a new language can be frightening, and that anxiety can be measured. A game can be replayed privately, so a wrong answer is never said in front of others. YAKKI also treats the language of feelings, requests, refusals and apologies as learning material.

Available Now games about emotions and communication; we recommend them from level B1. More on the Psychodidactics page.

Sources: Horwitz, Horwitz & Cope (1986) · Gordon (1970) · Rosenberg (2003) · Lieberman et al. (2007) · MacIntyre & Gregersen (2012)

7. Saying it the right way

A grammatical sentence can still sound rude. The directness Israelis read as honesty — known as dugri — often sounds blunt in English. Requests, apologies, refusals and complaints are built differently from culture to culture.

Available Now games where the child softens a refusal, presses a complaint politely, builds an apology from the right parts and moves between directness and diplomacy.

Sources: Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper (1989) · Blum-Kulka & Olshtain (1984) · Katriel (1986) · Wierzbicka (2003)

8. Dyslexia accessibility

Dyslexia affects roughly 5–15% of learners, and English adds a second, harder spelling system. The games were audited for accessibility, and from that audit we are building a dyslexia mode: a sans-serif font, wider spacing and contrast following the British Dyslexia Association style guide, voice input where typing is the barrier, read-aloud with highlighting, and more time in timed games. This is accessibility engineering, not a clinical intervention.

In Development the whole dyslexia mode — the adaptations and switching them on for a particular child. The mode will be free.

Sources: Shaywitz (2003) · Nijakowska (2010) · Breznitz (2006) · British Dyslexia Association style guide

9. The next step comes from practice

A score is useful only if it helps decide what to do next. The learner model will look at ordinary practice — hints used, retries, types of error — to adjust presentation, difficulty and format. It does not label the child.

In Development the learner model.

Sources: Messick (1989) · Lantolf & Poehner (2004) · Black & Wiliam (1998)

10. Being understood comes first

The goal of pronunciation is to be understood, not to sound like a native speaker: a strong accent often does not get in the way of understanding.

Available Now speaking games. Speech is not assessed; we only give recommendations. Speech can be assessed by a live person. A speaking game never fails a child or blocks a lesson: the child sees which sound is worth practising and gets a short task for it. There is no accent ranking, no leaderboard and no native-speaker target.

Sources: Munro & Derwing (1995) · Levis (2005, 2018) · Derwing & Munro (2015)

Built in Israel

YAKKI is built in Israel, for children here first. Much of the foundational research on Hebrew reading, Arabic diglossia, transfer between languages and cross-cultural pragmatics was done here; those works are in the references below.

Read about the approach

References

The publications cited on this page are listed below.

  1. Bar-On, A., & Share, D. L. (2018). The Triplex Model of Hebrew reading development. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 51(5), 444–453.
  2. Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 80(2), 139–148.
  3. Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, G. (Eds.). (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies (CCSARP). Ablex.
  4. Blum-Kulka, S., & Olshtain, E. (1984). Requests and apologies: A cross-cultural study of speech act realization patterns (CCSARP). Applied Linguistics, 5(3), 196–213.
  5. Breznitz, Z. (2006). Fluency in reading: Synchronization of processes. Lawrence Erlbaum.
  6. Cummins, J. (1979). Linguistic interdependence and the educational development of bilingual children. Review of Educational Research, 49(2), 222–251.
  7. Dagut, M., & Laufer, B. (1985). Avoidance of phrasal verbs: A case for contrastive analysis. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 7(1), 73–79.
  8. Derwing, T. M., & Munro, M. J. (2015). Pronunciation fundamentals: Evidence-based perspectives for L2 teaching and research. John Benjamins.
  9. Ehri, L. C. (2005). Learning to read words: Theory, findings, and issues. Scientific Studies of Reading, 9(2), 167–188.
  10. Gordon, T. (1970). Parent effectiveness training. Wyden.
  11. Horwitz, E. K., Horwitz, M. B., & Cope, J. (1986). Foreign language classroom anxiety. The Modern Language Journal, 70(2), 125–132.
  12. Jarvis, S., & Pavlenko, A. (2008). Crosslinguistic influence in language and cognition. Routledge.
  13. Kahn-Horwitz, J., Schwartz, M., & Share, D. L. (2011). Acquiring the complex English orthography: A triliteracy advantage? Journal of Research in Reading, 34(1), 136–151.
  14. Karpicke, J. D. (2017). Retrieval-based learning: A decade of progress. In J. Wixted (Ed.), Learning and memory: A comprehensive reference (2nd ed.). Academic Press.
  15. Katriel, T. (1986). Talking straight: Dugri speech in Israeli Sabra culture. Cambridge University Press.
  16. Katz, L., & Frost, R. (1992). The reading process is different for different orthographies: The orthographic depth hypothesis. In R. Frost & L. Katz (Eds.), Orthography, phonology, morphology, and meaning (pp. 67–84). North-Holland.
  17. Kellerman, E. (1983). Now you see it, now you don’t. In S. Gass & L. Selinker (Eds.), Language transfer in language learning. Newbury House.
  18. Krashen, S. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Pergamon.
  19. Lado, R. (1957). Linguistics across cultures. University of Michigan Press.
  20. Lantolf, J. P., & Poehner, M. E. (2004). Dynamic assessment of L2 development. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(1), 49–72.
  21. Laufer, B., & Hulstijn, J. (2001). Incidental vocabulary acquisition in a second language: The construct of task-induced involvement. Applied Linguistics, 22(1), 1–26.
  22. Levis, J. M. (2005). Changing contexts and shifting paradigms in pronunciation teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 39(3), 369–377.
  23. Levis, J. M. (2018). Intelligibility, oral communication, and the teaching of pronunciation. Cambridge University Press.
  24. Lieberman, M. D., et al. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.
  25. Long, M. H. (1996). The role of the linguistic environment in second language acquisition. In W. Ritchie & T. Bhatia (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 413–468). Academic Press.
  26. MacIntyre, P. D., & Gregersen, T. (2012). Emotions that facilitate language learning. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 2(2), 193–213.
  27. Messick, S. (1989). Validity. In R. L. Linn (Ed.), Educational measurement (3rd ed., pp. 13–103). Macmillan.
  28. Munro, M. J., & Derwing, T. M. (1995). Foreign accent, comprehensibility, and intelligibility in the speech of second language learners. Language Learning, 45(1), 73–97.
  29. Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge University Press.
  30. Nijakowska, J. (2010). Dyslexia in the foreign language classroom. Multilingual Matters.
  31. Pimsleur, P. (1967). A memory schedule. The Modern Language Journal, 51(2), 73–75.
  32. Roediger, H. L., & Butler, A. C. (2011). The critical role of retrieval practice in long-term retention. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(1), 20–27.
  33. Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). The power of testing memory: Basic research and implications for educational practice. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1(3), 181–210.
  34. Rosenberg, M. B. (2003). Nonviolent communication: A language of life. PuddleDancer Press.
  35. Saiegh-Haddad, E., & Geva, E. (2008). Morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and reading in English–Arabic bilingual children. Reading and Writing, 21(5), 481–504.
  36. Schwartz, M., Geva, E., Share, D. L., & Leikin, M. (2007). Learning to read in English as third language: The cross-linguistic transfer of phonological processing skills. Written Language & Literacy, 10(1), 25–52.
  37. Settles, B., & Meeder, B. (2016). A trainable spaced repetition model for language learning. Proceedings of ACL 2016, 1848–1858.
  38. Share, D. L. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition, 55(2), 151–218.
  39. Shaywitz, S. (2003). Overcoming dyslexia. Knopf.
  40. Swain, M. (1985). Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In S. Gass & C. Madden (Eds.), Input in second language acquisition (pp. 235–253). Newbury House.
  41. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. Harvard University Press.
  42. Wierzbicka, A. (2003). Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction (2nd ed.). Mouton de Gruyter.

Research collaboration

We welcome research collaborations on efficacy, accessibility and transfer between languages.

Research collaboration