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

Dragoş Ciobanu, Tony Hartley, Serge 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.
Anthology ID:
L06-1290
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)
Month:
May
Year:
2006
Address:
Genoa, Italy
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Aldo Gangemi, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/484_pdf.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dragoş Ciobanu, Tony Hartley, and Serge Sharoff. 2006. Using Richly Annotated Trilingual Language Resources for Acquiring Reading Skills in a Foreign Language. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06), Genoa, Italy. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Using Richly Annotated Trilingual Language Resources for Acquiring Reading Skills in a Foreign Language (Ciobanu et al., LREC 2006)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/484_pdf.pdf