We discuss the development of FeedBook, an intelligent electronic workbook supporting the teaching of English as Foreign Language in German secondary school. The overarching goal is to address real-life formal education needs using current Natural Language Processing technology.
Our interactive, web-based workbook is based on the print workbook of a schoolbook officially approved for 7th grade English classes in secondary schools in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The workbook offers a range of activities for students that typically are assigned by instructors as homework to accompany the regular English classes. In our web-based version, students can complete activities online, submit them to their teacher, and view teacher feedback. Teachers are supported in providing both formative and summative feedback to individual students by an auto-correct and feedback memory system, and they can view aggregates of student performance.
This article describes the development of the web-based workbook and its use from a technical and pedagogical perspective. We are currently working on adding automatic immediate feedback to learners that is designed to incrementally support individual learners in successfully completing a given task.
Luiz Amaral and Detmar Meurers. 2011. On using intelligent computer-assisted language learning in real-life foreign language teaching and learning. ReCALL, 23(1):4–24.
Luiz Amaral, Detmar Meurers, and Ramon Ziai. 2011. Analyzing learner language: Towards a flexible NLP architecture for intelligent language tutors. Computer-Assisted Language Learning, 24(1):1–16.
Fred J. Damerau. 1964. A technique for computer detection and correction of errors. Communications of the ACM, 7:171–176.
Richard Eckart de Castilho and Iryna Gurevych. 2014. A broad-coverage collection of portable NLP components for building shareable analysis pipelines. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Open Infrastructures and Analysis Frameworks for HLT (OIAF4HLT) at COLING 2014, pages 1–11, Dublin, Ireland. ACL and Dublin City University.
William DeSmedt. 1995. Herr Kommissar: An ICALL conversation simulator for intermediate German. In V. Melissa Holland, Jonathan Kaplan, and Michelle Sams, editors, Intelligent Language Tutors: Theory Shaping Technology, pages 153–174. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc., New Jersey.
Richard Eckart de Castilho, ´ Eva M´ujdricza-Maydt, Muhie Seid Yimam, Silvana Hartmann, Iryna Gurevych, Anette Frank, and Chris Biemann. 2016. A web-based tool for the integrated annotation of semantic and syntactic structures. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Technology Resources and Tools for Digital Humanities (LT4DH), pages 76–84.
David Ferrucci and Adam Lally. 2004. UIMA: An architectural approach to unstructured information processing in the corporate research environment. Natural Language Engineering, 10(3–4):327–348.
Trude Heift and Devlan Nicholson. 2001. Web delivery of adaptive and interactive language tutoring. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 12(4):310–325.
Trude Heift and Mathias Schulze. 2007. Errors and Intelligence in Computer-Assisted Language Learning: Parsers and Pedagogues. Routledge.
Trude Heift. 2001. Error-specific and individualized feedback in a web-based language tutoring system: Do they read it? ReCALL, 13(2):129–142.
Trude Heift. 2003. Multiple learner errors and meaningful feedback: A challenge for ICALL systems. CALICO Journal, 20(3):533–548.
Trude Heift. 2004. Corrective feedback and learner uptake in call. ReCALL, 16(2):416–431.
Trude Heift. 2005. Inspectable learner reports for webbased language learning. ReCALL, 17(1):32–46.
Daniel Karp, Yves Schabes, Martin Zaidel, and Dania Egedi. 1992. A freely available wide coverage morphological analyzer for English. In Proceedings of the 14th Conference on Computational Linguistics, COLING ’92, pages 950–955, Stroudsburg, PA.
Alison Mackey. 2006. Feedback, noticing and instructed second language learning. Applied Linguistics, 27(3):405–430.
Detmar Meurers and Markus Dickinson. 2017. Evidence and interpretation in language learning research: Opportunities for collaboration with computational linguistics. Language Learning, 67(2). http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/lang.12233.
Detmar Meurers, Ramon Ziai, Niels Ott, and Stacey Bailey. 2011a. Integrating parallel analysis modules to evaluate the meaning of answers to reading comprehension questions. IJCEELL. Special Issue on Automatic Free-text Evaluation, 21(4):355–369.
Detmar Meurers, Ramon Ziai, Niels Ott, and Janina Kopp. 2011b. Evaluating answers to reading comprehension questions in context: Results for German and the role of information structure. In Proceedings of the TextInfer 2011 Workshop on Textual Entailment, pages 1–9, Edinburgh.
Guido Minnen, John Carroll, and Darren Pearce. 2001. Applied morphological processing of English. Natural Language Engineering, 7(3):207–233.
Noriko Nagata. 1993. Intelligent computer feedback for second language instruction. The Modern Language Journal, 77(3):330–339.
Noriko Nagata. 1996. Computer vs. workbook instruction in second language acquistion. CALICO Journal, 14(1):53–75.
Noriko Nagata. 1997. The effectiveness of computerassisted metalinguistic instruction: A case study in Japanese. Foreign Language Annals, 30(2):187–200.
Noriko Nagata. 2002. BANZAI: An application of natural language processing to web-based language learning. CALICO Journal, 19(3):583–599.
Noriko Nagata. 2009. Robo-Sensei’s NLP-based error detection and feedback generation. CALICO Journal, 26(3):562–579.
Joakim Nivre, Jens Nilsson, Johan Hall, Atanas Chanev, G¨ulsen Eryigit, Sandra K¨ubler, Svetoslav Marinov, and Erwin Marsi. 2007. MaltParser: A language-independent system for data-driven dependency parsing. Natural Language Engineering, 13(1):1–41.
Niels Ott, Ramon Ziai, Michael Hahn, and Detmar Meurers. 2013. CoMeT: Integrating different levels of linguistic modeling for meaning assessment. In Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval), pages 608–616, Atlanta, GA. ACL.
Martí Quixal and Detmar Meurers. 2016. How can writing tasks be characterized in a way serving pedagogical goals and automatic analysis needs? CALICO Journal, 33:19–48.
Kent E. Sabo, Robert K. Atkinson, Angela L. Barrus, Stacey S. Joseph, and Ray S. Perez. 2013. Searching for the two sigma advantage: Evaluating algebra intelligent tutors. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(4):1833–1840.
Helmut Schmid. 2005. A programming language for finite state transducers. In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Finite State Methods in Natural Language Processing (FSMNLP), pages 308–309.
