18.3061, Diss: Comp Ling/Lang Acq: Koller: 'Design, Development, Implementat...'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-18-3061. Fri Oct 19 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 18.3061, Diss: Comp Ling/Lang Acq: Koller: 'Design, Development, Implementat...'

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1)
Date: 18-Oct-2007
From: Thomas Koller < thomas-koller at gmx.net >
Subject: Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation of a Plurilingual ICALL System for Romance Languages Aimed at Advanced Learners

 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 13:50:56
From: Thomas Koller [thomas-koller at gmx.net]
Subject: Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation of a Plurilingual ICALL System for Romance Languages Aimed at Advanced Learners
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Institution: Dublin City University 
Program: PhD in Applied Languages 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2007 

Author: Thomas Koller

Dissertation Title: Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation of a
Plurilingual ICALL System for Romance Languages Aimed at
Advanced Learners 

Dissertation URL:  http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~tkoller/phd.php

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Language Acquisition

Language Family(ies): Romance


Dissertation Director(s):
Monica Ward
Josef van Genabith

Dissertation Abstract:

Plurilingual teaching and learning of Romance languages exploits the
similarities between these languages to teach them contrastively and to
raise the language awareness of the learner. Several European projects have
been devoted to plurilingual teaching and learning of Romance languages.
The materials developed in these projects do not involve Natural Language
Processing (NLP) capabilities and almost exclusively focus on receptive skills.

The research goal of my Ph.D. dissertation was the design, development,
implementation and evaluation of an interactive plurilingual ICALL
(Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning) software system (ESPRIT)
for contrastive learning of French, Spanish and Italian aimed at advanced
learners. I investigated how techniques from NLP enhance the plurilingual
teaching and learning of these languages.

The ESPRIT toolset comprises dictionary tools, a concordancer, an input
analysis and feedback module, custom-made animated grammar presentations
and an authoring tool for animated text. Dictionary tools provide useful
information on unrestricted texts. The concordancer gives extensive
information about how a language term is used in different contexts. The
input analysis and feedback module dynamically provides precise feedback on
restricted learner input up to paragraph level. Custom-made animated
grammar presentations and learning materials created with the animation
authoring tool visualise contrastive grammatical properties and processes.

ESPRIT represents an interactive and flexible learning environment and is
designed for autonomous learning. Formative and summative evaluation
processes provided learner assessment data of different components of
ESPRIT. A web-based database-driven evaluation platform developed for
ESPRIT can easily be adapted to other evaluation projects. 





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