Year: 1996
Type: conference-abstract
Abstract: The network as a motivational source for using a foreign language.Electronic networks can be useful in many ways for language learners.First of all, network facilities (e-mail, news, WWW home-pages) minimize not only the boundaries of time and space, but they also help to break communication bar-tiers.They are a wonderful tool for USING a foreign language.E-mail, for example, can be used not only for interaction between teachers and students, but also for interaction among students (collaborative learning).Students can even ask for help from friends or "ex-perts" living elsewhere, on the other side of the globe.There have been quite a few attempts to introduce these new tools into the classroom.For example, there are several well established mailing lists between Japanese and foreign schools.This allows Japanese kids to practice, let's say English, by exchanging messages with students from "abroad", chatting about their favorite topics like music, sport or any other hobby.Obviously, this kind of communication is meaningful for the student, since s/he can talk about things s/he is concerned with.What role then can CALL system play in this new setting?Rather than trying to play the role people are very good at (answering on the fly questions on any topic, common sense reasoning, etc.), CALL system should assist people by providing the learner with information humans are generally fairly poor at.One way to help the user is by providing him with infor-mation (databases) he is looking for.For example, all language learners are concerned with lexicons.Having fabulous browsing tools, computers have a great advantage over traditional dictionaries.Also, people are not very good in explaining the contexts in which a word may be used, or in explaining the difference between two words.Last, but not least, existing NLP technology, such as parsing or machine translation, could be incorporated into the development of 'intel-ligent dictionaries'.However, before doing so, we have to consider several basic issues : what information is useful, that is, what in-formation should be provided to the learner, when and how?For example, rather than killing the user by an information overflow, -like these long list of translations that most electronic dictionaries provide, lists in which the user has to dig deeply in order to find the relevant word,one could parametrize the,level of detail, scope and grain size of trans-lations for a given text or text fragment.In sum, there should be a balance between the information provided by the system and the user's competence.Following this line of reasoning we have started to work on a user friendly interface for a bilingual lexicon (English-Japanese).Two features of our prototype are worth mentioning: (a) the tool is implemented as a WWW
Author: Inui Kentaro
Institution: Tokyo Institute of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1990933986