Learning English with IT'S-English

- 33 - LEARNING ENGLISH WITH IT'S ENLSH J.G.M. Jspes, G. Knselar, W.A.M. Kok Depment of Educational Sciences, Utrecht University Miling adress: rof. dr. Gellof Kanselar Depment of ducatioal Sciences Heidelbergln 2, 3584 CS Utrecht, oe Netherlnds 31.30.532352 31.30.534893, Fax: Tel: Emil: [email protected] ABSTRACT: uis paper descibes a new Computer Assisted Instruction program or oreign language (english) teaching based on a communicative approach. Due to the greater mobility and the closer ties in the Europen community, oreign languages have bcome an even more important subject in the school cuiculum. Bsed on the results of a study in 1989 [3], a new Computer Assisted Instruction program or oreign language teachng (English) has been deve!oped. Main eaures of his program re:he communicative approach, a 70.000 word dictionay, multimedia nd a syntactic prser. BACKGROUNDS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF IT'S ENGLISH To a lrge extent oreign lnguage teaching is directed towrds communicative goals. Scio­ cultural developments (mass media, holidays abroad etc.), scientific developments in teaching mehodology. the use of new media, linguistics nd psycholinguistics have led to a more funciona1 approach to foreign lnguage teaching. he traditional grammar-ranslation method, in which vocabulary was Iened mostly y memorizing L/LI lnguage pairs nd in which grammar was taught as a system of rules, did not directly lead to luent orl proficiency. In developing the CAI progrme we chose the communicative approach to foreign language teaching. In this approach language is viewed as an instrument of human behaviour. he behavioral "siuation" is carefully selectd in teaching. oe linguistic context, he siuation, spkers' rol es and types of texts re ll taken into creul consideration in the communicative approach. Linguistic unction is seen as more important than Iinguistic om. oe structuring of the leaning mateials is irst and oremost detenined by communicative needs. When designing he lening materials or the CAI programme we used Neuner' s typology as a stating point for he constuction of exercises. he ree types of exercises in the programme, including receptive, reproductive (cloze texts) and productive (ree sentence input) exercises can e placed on this continuum. BASIC AIMS AND ASSUMPTIONS he aim of the projct is to create a computer­ assisted leaning enviroment for communicative oreign language teaching [IJ. uis fom of oreign language teaching is oiented towrds an active and pssive command of a foreign language in everday situations. lt avoids trnslation as the oly or the most impont means of conveying meaning. Vocabuly is acquired on he basis of context­ speciic sentences and menings in the oreign language, to ensure the development of a Janguage sysem that is seprate rom the Iener's native language. In addition to the syntactic and mophologica1 characteristics of words, heir pronunciation is of great impotance, as is sentence intonation. he sound of a new word is a basic element in assigning meaning to that word. In order to efct this a reat number of words and sentences were stored on CD-ROM. oe aim of comicative language teaching is mainly achieved by having students use the non-native language productively. In order to achieve rndom lnguage-input a sentence paser was developed or the program. uis mkes use of he grammatica! infomation contaned in the D-ROM diciony. - 34 - he combination of dictionay, phonetic word­ representations and parser mkes it possible to create diferent receptive and productive exercises in this interactive lening environment. he sotwre progm T'S ENGLISH is primarily aimed at teaching vocabuly. However, as an intelligent tutorial system are werking on making it usable in the teaching of writing. In he following sections he program itself will e descibed. A short history of lt's English During a previous sudy [3] a program clled "PESIGE" written in SD-PROLOG and running on MSDOS ws created. This progrm allowed, among ether things, students to enter their own text. his limited dictiony (± 2000 words) proved toa small. Sudent aften used words not contained in this small dictionry. To overcome he problem of the limited dictionay we used a 70.000 word dictiony that was made avilable to us. he size of this dictionay however and the addition of sound capabilities to the progam made it inevitable to use anoher storage medium. At the time the CDROM-XA stndard was the most adequate choice. his resulted in a CDROM-XA disk which held bah the dictionay daabases and a great number of soundiles. This version of the program was tested in our groups of students in secondy education [7]. he MSDOS version of the progrm had o major drawbacks: the limited aount of memory available to he program and the limited capabiliies of the 80*25 character screen. In order to remove memoy limitations and improve on the user­ inteface a new version of the program is eing developed. îe new version uns under Microsot­ Windows version 3.1 in ehanced mode. his version was implemented in Prolog-2 or Windows, with some extensions in TurboPascal for windows. his ransition removed he memoy problem nd improved the user-intelace. not The CDROM-XA standard or sound however is suppoted by the windows multimedia environment. Conversion of the soundfiles to he standard multimedia omat of Windows (.WAV­ files) is curently in progress. DESCRPTION OF THE 'IT'S ENGLISH' PROGRM. A computer program hat connects with the above basic aims and assumptions should enable the user to reieve semntic deinitions and context sentences in English, as well as synonms, antonyms, pronunciation and the syntactic and mophological properties of words. In addition such a program should e capable of evaluating the user's use of lnguage to enable him or her to app!y the vocabulay in (re)poductive exercises. o achieve all this the program consists of several components: l. An automatic sentence parser which checks random Jnguage input or syntactic, orthographic or inlectional etc. corectness. 2. A CD-ROM database, which contains deiitions and context sentences in everyday­ English, as well as the grammatical properties and synonyms and ntonyms of over 70,000 words. 3. A CD-ROM database with the digitized pronunciation of over 5000 words, 1200 context sentences for the presentation of phonetic word representations and English intonation. 4. An exercise generator, which generates exercises or passive, active and reproductive Janguage use. 5. A eedback-generator, which uses the domain­ input of the parser to reveal and remedy lerner erors in (re)productive exercises. The Collins Cobuild English Language Dicionry [2] was chosen as a basis or the lexica! CD-ROM database. his dictiony meets the following requirements. lt was compiled or 'non­ naive lemers of English'. Each word is accompnied by a semantic defition in simple English, and a number of authentic, explanatory citations. In addition. each word meaning is accompanied by systematic and moderately detailed gammatica! infomation, for use by the parser. his direct connection etween grammatica} inonation and he semantic section makes he meaning of evey word hat is recognized by the parser instantly avilable for reieval, as well as a number of context sentences and ether relevant infomation such as synonyms, ntonyms and superordinate - 35 - terms. One inherent restriction in the application is that the parser's "power", that is, the number of English structures that can be automatically parsed, is limited by the grammatica! information available in COBUILD. An important advantage of using such an extensive dictionary is the availability of information on nearly all English words. In previous studies [3] we found that in productive exercises with limited dictionaries (2000 words) pupils often use words that are not in the selected subset of English. CD-ROM AS A STORAGE MEDIUM. Until recently it had not been possible in computeraided education to devote much attention to foreignlanguage pronunciation. in view of the large amounts of extemal memory involved. To a large extent the arrival of CD-ROM has removed Ibis restriction. In this project CD-ROM is used as a storage medium bath for digitalized pronunciation and the lexica! database based on Collins Cobuild Dictionary. The choice of the Extended Architecture (XA) standard for the CD-ROM in our project is exclusively related to the audio-component. The most important considerations in the choice of the XA-standard for the audio-component were the following: 1. The sound-quality had to be optima!. In particular the absence in speech of the higher sound-frequencies (3500 - 11000 Hz) makes it very difficult to distinguish the pronunciations of certain words in English, whereas more or less subtle sound differences in fact signa! differences in meaning. Tuis is especially important in speech from female speakers, because !heir speech is naturally richer in higher frequencies. 2. In the acqms1t10n of a goed foreignlanguage pronunciation it is of importance for learners that the phonetic representations of words should be presented not only in isolation but also in sentential contexts. The learner should experience the pronunciation of words as being connected with and influenced by !heir contextual position as well as by the intonation of the sentence. PROGRAM EXERCISES. The exercise generator. The generator is capable of generating different types of exercises on the basis of texts stored in the database. Exercises are been developed for the program which range from reading exercises to free writing. These exercises follow a route from receptive via reproductive to productive language use, and may be completed in a teacher- or learnerdetermined sequence. Three types of exercises have been developed so far in the making of the program. These are prototypical of the type of application that is possible with such programs. In developing these exercises we have followed Neuner [4], who distinguishes three main phases in an exercise sequence that leads to communicative 1anguage use. As a result of the newly-developed parser, adding exercises in more elaborate versions of the program is a relatively simple matter. - 36 - Figure 1: A reading exercise. ?,;':,; •• = flle IT'S Fnglish .Exerclses Yldeo M1111 (',nhmld · read s1ory ｾ＠ Windows D:IENGLISH\EXERCISE\JJ.STO [8J Sound fZIMeaning l8J Conte><t Thls Isa new story. lts short but enough to demonstrate the mos, 44@11®1 features. l8l Synonym fZI Antonym !8l Superord. l8lwordforms Something that is essential is considered to be extremety important or e>d:remely necessary Deategory l8l Paragraph fora particular sltuatlon or activity. e.g. lt Is essentlal to set yourtargets reanstlcalty _ e.g. e.g. e.g. Land Is essentlal for food and for werk ... ft is absolutety essential thatyou continue ... Qualifications are not essential. but some previous experience is useful __ _ A degree ls by no means an essentlal e.g. Joumallstlc qualtflcatlon. Synonym A. vltal Reading texts (receptive use). A fragment of a story is selected by the student or teacher from the text database. Learners are free to retrieve a definition of each text-word in English, or the context sentence that accompanies each word. As soon as a text has appeared on the screen, the user can click on any word on the screen to search for the word in the lexica! database. Definitions and contexts are retrieved and presented. If the selected word occurs m the sound-database that soundfragment will be presented to the student. The first meaning paragraph from the dictionary will be shown. Appropriate synonyms, antonyms and superordinate terms will be displayed. The user can select the type(s) of information by enabling options in the box in the upperleft corner of the screen The NEXT and PREVIOUS buttons enable the user to browse through the available information (see figure 1). It will also be possible for the teacher to mark a word in advance to indicate that the leamer should call up information about that word later. In this process word-specific feedback can be provided by the teacher. B. Texts with blanks (reproductive use) In the creation of texts with blanks one or more properties of a word, all of which are recorded in the parser's property-list, may serve as a criterion for the omission of that word from the exercise, or for its inclusion in it. For example, texts could be created without any prepositions or adjectives. The decision to leave out all nouns, verbs, prepositions or adjectives can be taken by the teacher or the ieamer. Sentence constituents such as verb phrases can also be left out. This type of filling-in exercise is clearly superior to the cloze-texts of current prevalence, in which only every n-th word may be omitted. Since the database can be put into operation in the analysis of the leamers' answers, feedback can be provided which is aimed at various kinds of errors. This makes IT' S ENGLISH different from traditional programs, in which every erroneous answer, plus the accompanying feedback, - 37 - Figure 2: A gapfiling exercise ｾ＠ IT'S fnqhsh Bie fxerclses ,Çobulld farser ~deo Ml(J,: Coln11ld fill g;,ip~ m story Windows A _ _ ol 11orniilhing Is II putlcuhir part of lt or ch11r11dcrlstlc th11t lt has , whlch you notlce , bcaiuac lt 11ccms lmportzmt or lnt!:rcsUng - Thlslsanew_. lts short but enough to demonstrate the most essentlal has to be anticipated and dealt with. The type of feedback that is provided by IT' S ENGLISH for filling-in exercises can be of the following kind: the typed-in answer is synonymous with a superordinate concept; the word class is correct but the actual word is not; information about possible 'typing errors' which is based on an a]gorithm; information about conjugation and other grammatica! characteristics. It is also possible to provide help by giving a context sentence provided by the dictionary from which the target word has also been omitted (see figure 2) C. Random text-input (productive use). This type of exercise allows the learner to type in a story. The parser checks each sentence for grammatica] correctness. Parsing of natura! language is quite a complicated process. The current version of the parser knows over 400 rules to connect words to form grammatical sentenceconstituents. The current version of the parser is able to analyse some quite complicated sentences. Most parsers are build around a relatively small dictionary where the information is tailored to the needs of the parser. Our parser is completely dependend on the information from the Cobuild dictionary. One consequence is the programs inability to obtain gender information from the dictionary. For a parser to be able to pinpoint an error in a sentence we will have to adapt the parsing mechanism to generale a hypothesis for possible errors. Tuis will require extensive modifications to the parsing mechanism and research into the most common errors of students. When an error occurs a feedback message will be generated and the learner is given an opportunity to correct the error. The final story is stored in the text database, and can thus serve as a basis for new exercises. Tuis enables leamers, among other things. to create fill-in exercises for each other. All the help options based on the dictionary that are available for the receptive exercises are similarly available for this type of productive exercise. The structure of a sentence can be made visible in tree-form on the screen. This possibility of random language input has one drawback: it makes great demands on the speed and capacity of the computer. The dictionary generates all possible grammatica! uses of each word in a sentence. Tuis gives rise to a combinatorial explosion of possible ambiguities. Tuis slows down the parsing process.We are looking into ways of optimizing the parsing process to cape with this problem. However, in our opinion the program is uniquely valuable at present precisely because of its - 38 - Figure 3: A parsed sentence - . ｾ＠ IT'S I nqhsh IOIM Cohrnlcl P..trsc frpe sc>nlPllCP - flle noun_ph,..,,,., ,., dctorminer capacity for processing random input, with graphical feedback about the grammaticality of input-sentences (see figure 3) In the teaching of wntmg various aspects of writing practice can be dealt with, such as planning and organization, fonnulation and revision. The program offers help in fonnulation at sentence level. A panicularly powerful aid is the ability to call up context sentences for a particular word in order to examine its use in frequently occuring contexts. Learner registration. The pro gram stores information conceming the words that each learner has studied up to a given moment, the help that has been requested and the answers to the exercises that have been given. These data can be scrutinized by the teacher. Exercise developrnent. The system applications allow learners as well as teachers to enter random texts for the development of exercises. For example, a teacher could in principle enter a text for later use by the learner to develop exercises. There are two entry-checks. The first one tests whether the word with the desired grammatica} properties is present in the computer lexicon. The second check tests whether the parser is capable of parsing the input-sentence and whether the sentence is grammatica!. Bath checks are required for the creation of exercises. Stories can also be entered after the parser has been cancelled. In such cases the only type of operation to be carried out is the connection of each word to its first dictionary meaning. The advantages of tb.is option are that the input-process is faster and that texts of any degree of difficulty can be entered. Tuis kind of text can only be used for receptive exercises. The generative potentia! of the parser and the great amount of information in the lexica! database make it possible for the progam to adjust quickly to different teaching methods by allowing for the addition of method-specific texts. The menu-driven environment and the extensive context-sensitive help-options make the program very user-friendly for bath teachers and leamers. The unambiguous screen layout makes it relatively simple to enter - 39 - commands. It should be bome in mind, however, that the program's full potential can only be realized with suitable machines (i.e. computers with 80486 processors, 50 Mhz, 8 Mb RAM, hard disk, Windows 3.1 and a soundcard). 5 Markham, P. Effects of contexrual versus definitional computer-assisted vocabulary instruction on immediate an dlong-terrn vocabulary retention of advanced ESL srudents. Educational Psychology, 9(2), 121-126, 1989. Multimedia 6 Gein, J. van de, The sense of sentences. A srudy into the effects of grammar instruction upon junior writing. Proefschrift, 17 mei 1991 te Utrecht The Windows environment supports a wide variety of ways to present information. Text an graphics are the most common types used in applications. 7 With the addition of a soundcard sound can be easily recorded and played back. This way listening comprehension tests could be created. A relatively new addition is the ability to display digital video in a windows on the screen. The performance in frame-rate and the size of the playback-windows is currently quite limited. Advances in image compression will soon overcome these problems. Use of digital video in language teaching opens other powerfull ways of creating interesting exercises. References Kanselaar, G. & T. van Maanen, Vreemdetalenonderwijs met computers in het voortgezet onderwijs: verkenning en inventarisatie van een onderzoeksgebied. In: Cluster V onderwijsonderzoek: twee studies van het Instituut voor het onderzoek van her onderwijs. PSOI-reeks nr.31, 1987, p. 3-154. 2 Sinclair, J. (Ed.), Col/ins COBU!W English Language Dictionary. Collins, London and G!asgow, 1987. 3 Kanselaar, G., M. Giezeman, J. Jaspers, L. Koster, J. van der Veen, H. Wichmann, J. Zuidema. Computerondersteund vreemde talenonderwijs (eindverslag van SVO-project 7108). Utrecht: ISOR, Universiteit te Utrecht, 1989. 4 Neuner, G., M. Krüger & U. Grewer, Übungstypologie zum kommunika.ti.ven Deutschunterricht, Berlin: Langenscheidt KG, 1981. Kanselaar,G., Kok, WAM, Jaspers, J.G.M. It' s English: Engels leren met computer en CDROM. ISOR-rapportnumrner 91.07, ISOR / Universiteit Utrecht, 1991.