Textual Features Indicative of Writing Proficiency in Elementary School Spanish Documents

Gemma Bel-Enguix, Diana Dueñas Chávez, Arturo Curiel Díaz


Abstract
Childhood acquisition of written language is not straightforward. Writing skills evolve differently depending on external factors, such as the conditions in which children practice their productions and the quality of their instructors’ guidance. This can be challenging in low-income areas, where schools may struggle to ensure ideal acquisition conditions. Developing computational tools to support the learning process may counterweight negative environmental influences; however, few work exists on the use of information technologies to improve childhood literacy. This work centers around the computational study of Spanish word and syllable structure in documents written by 2nd and 3rd year elementary school students. The studied texts were compared against a corpus of short stories aimed at the same age group, so as to observe whether the children tend to produce similar written patterns as the ones they are expected to interpret at their literacy level. The obtained results show some significant differences between the two kinds of texts, pointing towards possible strategies for the implementation of new education software in support of written language acquisition.
Anthology ID:
W18-3716
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Editors:
Yuen-Hsien Tseng, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Vincent Ng, Mamoru Komachi
Venue:
NLP-TEA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
113–118
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-3716
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-3716
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gemma Bel-Enguix, Diana Dueñas Chávez, and Arturo Curiel Díaz. 2018. Textual Features Indicative of Writing Proficiency in Elementary School Spanish Documents. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications, pages 113–118, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Textual Features Indicative of Writing Proficiency in Elementary School Spanish Documents (Bel-Enguix et al., NLP-TEA 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-3716.pdf