Building a suite of online resources to support academic vocabulary learning

Stefania Spina Universit per Stranieri di Perugia, Italia sspina@unistrapg.it

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
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

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

1. identify academic words 2. create online tools to train students 3. 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

text filtered

il potenziale della tecnologia nella didattica

il ART NOUN ARTPRE NOUN il potenziale di tecnologia

1. POS-tagged

potenziale della tecnologia

2. compare with DB 3. match found

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.