Analysis of Foreign Language Teaching Methods: An Automatic Readability Approach

Nasser Zalmout, Hind Saddiki, Nizar Habash


Abstract
Much research in education has been done on the study of different language teaching methods. However, there has been little investigation using computational analysis to compare such methods in terms of readability or complexity progression. In this paper, we make use of existing readability scoring techniques and our own classifiers to analyze the textbooks used in two very different teaching methods for English as a Second Language – the grammar-based and the communicative methods. Our analysis indicates that the grammar-based curriculum shows a more coherent readability progression compared to the communicative curriculum. This finding corroborates with the expectations about the differences between these two methods and validates our approach’s value in comparing different teaching methods quantitatively.
Anthology ID:
W16-4916
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications (NLPTEA2016)
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Hsin-Hsi Chen, Yuen-Hsien Tseng, Vincent Ng, Xiaofei Lu
Venue:
NLP-TEA
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
122–130
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-4916
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nasser Zalmout, Hind Saddiki, and Nizar Habash. 2016. Analysis of Foreign Language Teaching Methods: An Automatic Readability Approach. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications (NLPTEA2016), pages 122–130, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Analysis of Foreign Language Teaching Methods: An Automatic Readability Approach (Zalmout et al., NLP-TEA 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-4916.pdf