ELT - Electronic Learning Tool

Deaf or hearing impaired people often show poor competences in written language. This article describes the development of an online multimedia tool for deaf and/or hard-of-hearing people to train their German written language. The name of this tool is ELT (Electronic Learning Tool) and it was developed in cooperation with the Centre for Sign Language and Deaf Communication (ZHG) at the University of Klagenfurt. ELT consists of three modules - the administration module, the design module, and the presentation module - and a server component for data storage. Course administrators and designers may organize and create courses for the users who in turn have the possibility to visit specific courses and to do exercises. Every course is subdivided into four learning domains (grammar, reading, writing, and spelling/orthography) which represent the structure of German language. In the presentation module the user can look up explanations for all words in sign language in a lexicon to better understand the problems to be solved.