Introduction

Let's discover HUST PVO in less than 20 minutes.

What is HUST PVO?

HUST PVO is a Personalized Vocabulary Organizer web app. Access the application at: https://www.hustpvo.xyz.

This software comes from Dr. Ho Le Vu's research on methods and software (named PVO) to support foreign language learners by association mechanism.

The Personalized Vocabulary Organizer (PVO), a link-based learning system, helps L2 learners organize and recall their foreign vocabulary. PVO employs an association mechanism that lets learners build up their own lexical network by linking words semantically (Ho Le Vu, 2006)

HUST PVO is developed from this idea, but is an independent product of Dr. Ho Le Vu's PVO software. HUST PVO is developed and used for learning purposes only, no source code from the original version of PVO software is referenced.

Motivation

One approach with great potential to help learners build effective vocabulary is the link-based approach.

Using associations between words is a way to organize items, making them easier to learn and recall. The reason is that the nature of words has relationships and links with each other. Psychologically, with a new word, learners often integrate it into the relationship with their existing vocabulary and semantic system.

There have been many ideas about linked dictionaries, such as dictionaries of synonyms, dictionaries organized by fields and topics. One of them is WordNet - a large English vocabulary database that allows users to semantically browse vocabulary. WordNet uses groups of synonyms (synsets) to represent lexical concepts.

The limitation of the software and linked dictionaries mentioned above is the degree of autonomy of learners in building semantic networks. These systems all approach the expert model, that is, the lexical items and semantic associations have been pre-selected and the learners cannot change these associations.

With PVO, the software is deployed in a non-expert model, promoting learners to self-develop and organize vocabulary. Learners have almost complete control over which words should be integrated into the system and establish semantic links between them. The feasibility and effectiveness of the software idea has been tested in Dr. Ho Le Vu's research.

Inheriting the advantages and overcoming the limitations, HUST PVO combines both expert model and non-expert model. Learners still have complete autonomy in building their vocabulary dictionary, but will have additional help from looking up existing dictionary sources. HUST PVO uses resources from the Free Dictionary API, Words API (WordNet will be available in the future) as a reference source for users.

Let's start

Let's get started with HUST PVO tutorials.