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Building a suite of online resources to supportacademic vocabulary learning

Stefania SpinaUniversit per Stranieri di Perugia, [email protected]

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LELE: Linguistically-Enhanced Learning Environment

part of a more general project

APRIL:Ambiente Personalizzato di Rete per lInsegnamento Linguistico (A PLE forlanguage learning)

aim: enrich a Personal Learning Environmentfor online language courses withlinguistic tools created from Natural Language Processing technologies

EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning

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Origin

need to expand academic vocabulary of non-native University students

to attend University programs: level B2 CEFR. But...

previous research: unreliable knowledge of academic vocabulary

tipologically distant L1

European and Romance languages


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4 vocabulary categories

1. high frequency words

2. academic words:

high frequency in all academic texts, regardless of subject areas

3. technical words:

subject-specific words

4. low frequency words


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casa (home)

mangiare (eat)biglietto (ticket)

approccio (approach)

elaborare (elaborate)

consolidato (well-established)

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Lexical tests on academic vocabulary

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Three steps

1. identify academic words

2. create online tools to train students

3. test the online tools


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Identifying academic words

Coxhead 2000

written corpus of academic texts (textbooks, lesson notes, dissertations, researcharticles)

1 million words, 239 texts (average length 4.000 words)

three subject areas (333.000 words each):

humanities

science

law and economy


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Extraction of frequency list

dispersion:

words occurring in all the 3 sections, frequency 10

words occurring in at least 2 sections, frequency:

40 in the corpus (total)

10 in each of the 2 sections


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The Academic Italian Word List (AIWL)

resulting list compared with Vocabolario di base(De Mauro 1980):

7000 most frequent italian words

the 404 words that are not in the Vdbconstitutes the AIWL:

words that frequently appear in academic texts, regardless of subject areas

The AIWL, with its 2827 inflected forms, covers 5% of the total word of the academic

corpus; Vdb covers 80%.


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Composition of the AIWL

191 nouns

134 adjectives

46 adverbs

32 verbs

1 preposition

Examples: approccio(approach), consolidato(well-established), peraltro(moreover),identificare(identify), contesto(context)


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From AIWL to a lexical database

The AIWL is the basic step for the constitution of a lexical database, that includes, for allthe 404 academic words, the following information:

lemma

inflected forms (2827)

part of speech

definition

examples


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Example of the lexical database (MySql)

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Integration in a PLE

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il potenziale della tecnologia nella didattica

il ART il

potenziale NOUN potenziale

della ARTPRE di

tecnologia NOUN tecnologia

text filtered

1. POS-tagged

2. compare with DB

potenziale NOUN potenziale3. match found

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Database + POS tagger = disambiguation

words that have different POS (tagger shows the appropriate linguistic informationextracted from the database)

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Automatic cloze-generation

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Student-generated glossary

students can add other difficult words in an open glossary, with definitions and examples

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Learning advantages

improve students ability to understand written academic texts

focus on academic vocabulary (highlighted, defined, explained with examples andgrammatically categorised)

expand academic vocabulary adding their own entries and definitions


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Future work

lexical database:

adding collocation dictionary

PLE:

automatically insert Wikipedia articles or other texts


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Conclusions: Lele

is integrated in a PLE;

is corpus-based;

is NLP-based (works with a POS-tagger);

it is social (student-generated open glossary);

it will be connected to other lexical tools


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References

Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34, 213-238.

De Mauro, T. (1980). Guida all'uso delle parole. Roma: Editori Riuniti.

Horst, M., & Cobb, T. (2001). Growing academic vocabulary with a collaborative on-linedatabase. In B. Morrison, D. Gardner, K. Keobke, & M. Spratt (Eds.), ELT perspectiveson IT & multimedia; Selected papers from the ITMELT Conference 2001 (pp. 189-225).Hong Kong: Polytechnic University.

Nation, I. S. P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Documents

Euro Call 09