Digital graded readers are not uncommon, but these special books for extensive reading do not yet employ the kind of hyperglossing that may offer great learning benefits for English language learners.
With Jay Tanaka, I am currently working on a project that will hopefully shine some light on the possible benefits of hyperglossing for digital graded readers. We hope to answer the following question: Can immediate L1 hyperglossing of unknown words, in haptic tablet computer environments, help L2 readers of English to compensate for a less than sufficient lexical coverage when doing extensive reading with a digital text?
This is a video demonstration of a working hyperglossing system for iPad that I created for the research project. In total, there are 4 different digital texts that run the hyperglossing system: one for 89% lexical coverage, one for 92% lexical coverage, one for 95% lexical coverage, and one for 98% lexical coverage.
Richard Schoonmaker 