Abstract
Taking advantage of the improving Mobile Web technologies, mobile language-learning systems plays an important role for self-learning, especially in the case of working people. Nevertheless, existing systems do not support learners in studying or practicing language materials related with the current context. As it is known, the context related with surroundings can deepen the impressions and naturally explain the meanings of the sentences in a learner's memory, which leads to an easy and casual language-learning experience. To achieve this goal, a context-based support system of mobile Chinese learning for foreigners in China is proposed by this research. The system can provide a learner with Chinese-learning materials related with what he is doing or what he is going to do. Besides, it also can generally adapt to learners' profiles like many existing personalized e-learning systems. In the system, a context-based ontology is investigated to represent the knowledge that is used to support the process of matching context with suitable language-learning materials, and inference rules in the matching process are developed by Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). Four steps of the matching process are realized based on the knowledge representation method and the rules. The implementation of the prototype system shows that it can support the mobile Chinese-learning process by providing a learner with suitable learning materials related with the contexts of the task he/she is doing or going to do, his/her profile and mobile device, so that it can greatly improve the effect and efficiency of learning. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.