Teacher Perception of Automatically Extracted Grammar Concepts for L2 Language Learning

Aditi Chaudhary, Arun Sampath, Ashwin Sheshadri, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Graham Neubig


Abstract
One of the challenges in language teaching is how best to organize rules regarding syntax, semantics, or phonology in a meaningful manner. This not only requires content creators to have pedagogical skills, but also have that language’s deep understanding. While comprehensive materials to develop such curricula are available in English and some broadly spoken languages, for many other languages, teachers need to manually create them in response to their students’ needs. This is challenging because i) it requires that such experts be accessible and have the necessary resources, and ii) describing all the intricacies of a language is time-consuming and prone to omission. In this work, we aim to facilitate this process by automatically discovering and visualizing grammar descriptions. We extract descriptions from a natural text corpus that answer questions about morphosyntax (learning of word order, agreement, case marking, or word formation) and semantics (learning of vocabulary). We apply this method for teaching two Indian languages, Kannada and Marathi, which, unlike English, do not have well-developed resources for second language learning. To assess the perceived utility of the extracted material, we enlist the help of language educators from schools in North America to perform a manual evaluation, who find the materials have potential to be used for their lesson preparation and learner evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.246
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3776–3793
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.246
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.246
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aditi Chaudhary, Arun Sampath, Ashwin Sheshadri, Antonios Anastasopoulos, and Graham Neubig. 2023. Teacher Perception of Automatically Extracted Grammar Concepts for L2 Language Learning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 3776–3793, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Teacher Perception of Automatically Extracted Grammar Concepts for L2 Language Learning (Chaudhary et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.246.pdf