Planning Tutorial Text in a System for Teaching English as a Second Language to Deaf Learners

In this paper we discuss an envisioned text planner for a computer-assisted instruction tool for deaf learners of English. We describe the problem of deaf literacy and overview our system, designed to act as a writing tutor that generates text to explain the errors found in a user's written compositions. These explanations are created according to a response anatomy that divides the planning task into a bottom-up phase for grouping and ordering explanations and a top-down phase for building a hierarchical text plan to create the explanatory text. This is then followed by a revision of the complete plan to place it in its greater context. At all levels of planning, the explanation is personalized to the individual learner's styles and knowledge in order to maximize the learning experience.