If you want to build or improve an EdTech product for literacy, the iRead project’s Linguistic Infrastructure can help. Available for novice readers of English, Spanish, Greek, and German as well as English as a Foreign Language learners, the Linguistic Infrastructure provides developers with content to support the journey of a student learning to read.

Capture the journey of a student learning to read

Our team of linguists and education researchers from top universities across Europe used rigorous research techniques informed by the latest science to develop the dictionaries and language models of the Linguistic Infrastructure.  The dictionaries provide useful information about words including phonics features, chunking and syllabification, and grammar such as parts of speech. The language models capture the journey of a student learning to read and contain information such as which language features should be mastered before introducing a new one.

Why use the Linguistic Infrastructure

We engaged with a range of EdTech companies to understand the challenges they face in developing their products.

“When we’re building a new game, we need to find words that have the correct linguistic features but that are also kid-friendly, and that can be really hard.”

The Linguistic Infrastructure includes over 10,000 words per language.  All of the words were gathered by our researchers from a corpus of children’s texts and books, so you can be confident they are child appropriate.

“We’ve struggled a lot building our database and getting all the words. Every time we want to add a new book, we have to go through the words we don’t have and tag them, which is the bit that takes quite a bit of time.”

Each of the thousands of words in the Dictionaries has been tagged with essential information such as phonics features and parts of speech. Click here for more info.

“We’ve spent years developing our literacy curriculum.  We’ve invested huge amounts of time and money into our product.”

The Language Models can be used to quickly identify which language features a child should be introduced to next based on where they are in their learning journey.

The Linguistic Infrastructure has already proven itself

The Linguistic Infrastructure has already been used to create the DfE award-winning app, ‘Navigo- Pyramid of the Lost Words’.

The iRead project’s Linguistic Infrastructure can help you help your students.

Do you want more information?

  • To find out more about the linguistic Infrastructure, contact us at iread@edia.nl
  • For more information about the content and development of the linguistic infrastructure, access our white paper.
  • To learn how the linguistic infrastructure was used to develop the Navigo literacy game and Amigo reader, access our linguistic infrastructure blog series.
  • Download a sample here

Download full resources