LREC 2006 - Proceedings sorted by papers

Title	Using Richly Annotated Trilingual Language Resources for Acquiring Reading Skills in a Foreign Language
Authors	D. Ciobanu, T. Hartley, S. Sharoff
Abstract	In an age when demand for innovative and motivating language teaching methodologies is at a very high level, TREAT - the Trilingual REAding Tutor - combines the most advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques with the latest second and third language acquisition (SLA/TLA) research in an intuitive and user-friendly environment that has been proven to help adult learners (native speakers of L1) acquire reading skills in an unknown L3 which is related to (cognate with) an L2 they know to some extent. This corpus-based methodology relies on existing linguistic resources, as well as materials that are easy to assemble, and can be adapted to support other pairs of L2-L3 related languages, as well. A small evaluation study conducted at the Leeds University Centre for Translation Studies indicates that, when using TREAT, learners feel more motivated to study an unknown L3, acquire significant linguistic knowledge of both the L3 and L2 rapidly, and increase their performance when translating from L3 into L1.
Keywords	computer-assisted language learning, corpus, multilinguality, third language acquisition
Full paper	Using Richly Annotated Trilingual Language Resources for Acquiring Reading Skills in a Foreign Language

Title

Using Richly Annotated Trilingual Language Resources for Acquiring Reading Skills in a Foreign Language

Authors

D. Ciobanu, T. Hartley, S. Sharoff

Abstract

In an age when demand for innovative and motivating language teaching methodologies is at a very high level, TREAT - the Trilingual REAding Tutor - combines the most advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques with the latest second and third language acquisition (SLA/TLA) research in an intuitive and user-friendly environment that has been proven to help adult learners (native speakers of L1) acquire reading skills in an unknown L3 which is related to (cognate with) an L2 they know to some extent. This corpus-based methodology relies on existing linguistic resources, as well as materials that are easy to assemble, and can be adapted to support other pairs of L2-L3 related languages, as well. A small evaluation study conducted at the Leeds University Centre for Translation Studies indicates that, when using TREAT, learners feel more motivated to study an unknown L3, acquire significant linguistic knowledge of both the L3 and L2 rapidly, and increase their performance when translating from L3 into L1.

Keywords

computer-assisted language learning, corpus, multilinguality, third language acquisition

Full paper

Using Richly Annotated Trilingual Language Resources for Acquiring Reading Skills in a Foreign Language