"... learning software as effective as a personal tutor ..." (from President Obama's address to the National Academy of Sciences, 27 April 2009)

Flexible Language Acquisition Project

Watch a video about FLAX! (38 mins 99 MB), or right click to download an AVI file (170 MB)

FLAX is now in Moodle. Try it out here

Objective: to automate the production and delivery of practice exercises for overseas students who are learning English. The exercises will involve students in a virtually endless supply of collaborative and competitive language activities that are interesting, compelling, and rewarding.

Strategy: to deploy digital library software to allow teachers and students to capitalise on top-quality prose and multimedia resources already present in the world's libraries. This yields an unprecedented supply of linguistic material for students to practise on.

Presentation: to provide a web-based social setting, matching in real time students in different locations who opt for a particular type of exercise, allowing them to discuss and negotiate its parameters using chat, and undertake activities that are competitive or collaborative.

License: All software produced by this project is open source, issued under the GNU General Public License.

Language: The interface to the system will be capable of being easily translated into any language.

Funding: Foundational research is supported by a grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund entitled Interlingual digital libraries for language learning. Applied research is supported by a grant from the New Zealand Foundation For Research Science & Technology entitled Enhancing competitiveness of NZ's TESOL industry in Asia.