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Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning

Stefania Spina
Stefania Spina

Presentation at EUROCALL 2009 (Gandia, Spain). Title: "Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning"

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Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning Stefania Spina Universit per Stranieri di Perugia, Italia [email_address]
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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 for language learning) aim: enrich a Personal Learning Environment for online language courses with linguistic tools created from Natural Language Processing technologies EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
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 EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
4 vocabulary categories high frequency words academic words: high frequency in all academic texts, regardless of subject areas technical words: subject-specific words low frequency words EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
casa (home) mangiare (eat) biglietto (ticket) approccio (approach) elaborare (elaborate) consolidato (well-established)
Lexical tests on academic vocabulary
Three steps identify academic words create online tools to train students test the online tools EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
Identifying academic words Coxhead 2000 written corpus of academic texts (textbooks, lesson notes, dissertations, research articles) 1 million words, 239 texts (average length 4.000 words) three subject areas (333.000 words each): humanities science law and economy EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
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 EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
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 Vdb constitutes 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%. EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
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) EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
From AIWL to a lexical database The AIWL is the basic step for the constitution of a lexical database, that includes, for all the 404 academic words, the following information: lemma inflected forms (2827) part of speech definition examples EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
Example of the lexical database (MySql)
Integration in a PLE
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il potenziale della tecnologia nella didattica text filtered 1. POS-tagged 2. compare with DB 3. match found il ART il potenziale NOUN potenziale della ARTPRE di tecnologia NOUN tecnologia potenziale NOUN potenziale
Database + POS tagger = disambiguation words that have different POS (tagger shows the appropriate linguistic information extracted from the database)
Automatic cloze-generation
Student-generated glossary students can add other difficult words in an open glossary, with definitions and examples
Learning advantages improve students ability to understand written academic texts focus on academic vocabulary (highlighted, defined, explained with examples and grammatically categorised) expand academic vocabulary adding their own entries and definitions EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
Future work lexical database: adding collocation dictionary PLE: automatically insert Wikipedia articles or other texts EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
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 EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
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-line database . In B. Morrison, D. Gardner, K. Keobke, & M. Spratt (Eds.), ELT perspectives on 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.

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Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning

  • 1. Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning Stefania Spina Universit per Stranieri di Perugia, Italia [email_address]
  • 2. 油
  • 3. LELE: Linguistically-Enhanced Learning Environment part of a more general project APRIL: Ambiente Personalizzato di Rete per lInsegnamento Linguistico (A PLE for language learning) aim: enrich a Personal Learning Environment for online language courses with linguistic tools created from Natural Language Processing technologies EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
  • 4. 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 EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
  • 5. 4 vocabulary categories high frequency words academic words: high frequency in all academic texts, regardless of subject areas technical words: subject-specific words low frequency words EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
  • 6. casa (home) mangiare (eat) biglietto (ticket) approccio (approach) elaborare (elaborate) consolidato (well-established)
  • 7. Lexical tests on academic vocabulary
  • 8. Three steps identify academic words create online tools to train students test the online tools EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
  • 9. Identifying academic words Coxhead 2000 written corpus of academic texts (textbooks, lesson notes, dissertations, research articles) 1 million words, 239 texts (average length 4.000 words) three subject areas (333.000 words each): humanities science law and economy EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
  • 10. 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 EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
  • 11. 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 Vdb constitutes 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%. EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
  • 12. 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) EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
  • 13. From AIWL to a lexical database The AIWL is the basic step for the constitution of a lexical database, that includes, for all the 404 academic words, the following information: lemma inflected forms (2827) part of speech definition examples EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
  • 14. Example of the lexical database (MySql)
  • 16. 油
  • 17. 油
  • 18. 油
  • 19. 油
  • 20. 油
  • 21. 油
  • 22. il potenziale della tecnologia nella didattica text filtered 1. POS-tagged 2. compare with DB 3. match found il ART il potenziale NOUN potenziale della ARTPRE di tecnologia NOUN tecnologia potenziale NOUN potenziale
  • 23. Database + POS tagger = disambiguation words that have different POS (tagger shows the appropriate linguistic information extracted from the database)
  • 25. Student-generated glossary students can add other difficult words in an open glossary, with definitions and examples
  • 26. Learning advantages improve students ability to understand written academic texts focus on academic vocabulary (highlighted, defined, explained with examples and grammatically categorised) expand academic vocabulary adding their own entries and definitions EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
  • 27. Future work lexical database: adding collocation dictionary PLE: automatically insert Wikipedia articles or other texts EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
  • 28. 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 EUROCALL 2009 - Stefania Spina - Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning
  • 29. 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-line database . In B. Morrison, D. Gardner, K. Keobke, & M. Spratt (Eds.), ELT perspectives on 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.