Abstract
The CAI software was proposed for false beginners of English, low proficiency adults at university despite six years of formal English courses at junior and senior high schools. The main difficulty shared by such learners lies in the lexical processing of an aurally presented word to understand its meaning and spelling, which is the first step of language acquisition. The authors developed the card-game-type software, which provides information through multiple perceptual modalities, to help such learners recognize the English words. The software includes three levels of learning: from the first level with three modalities of the word; sound, picture and spelling, to the third level with only sound. Thirty-four university students used the software for approximately fifteen minutes in each English class for nine weeks. The results of the game histories and the dictation tests before and after the training suggests that the software is potentially effective in improving learners' automatic processing of single words.
