Mehrsprachigkeit in Europa: Plurilinguismo in Europa ... - EURAC

Judith Knapp, Angelika Höber
approximately 150 words each. To each, six questions have been added which the learner has to
answer with complete sentences in the target language. For a reduced set of texts we developed
hints and simple quizzes such that the user can elaborate the answer in several steps.
The project has been developed by an interdisciplinary team consisting of linguists,
language teachers, computational linguists and computer scientists. As a result on one hand
all information in ELDIT has been carefully selected and prepared up by language experts
according to modern didactic and psycholinguistic criteria (Abel and Weber 2000, Abel 2004).
On the other hand the data is encoded and stored in a highly structured way (Gamper and
Knapp 2003) which made it possible to implement a sophisticated search engine especially
targeted at supporting language learners and to reuse the information on different places in
the system (Knapp 2004). We furthermore included externally developed language resources in
order to enlarge the amount of information provided for each word (Knapp et al., in print).
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Figure 1: Screenshot of the ELDIT dictionary
2. Cognitive Aspects – Didactic Demands
Holding a dictionary and a text corpus ELDIT still seemed to be missing one elementary feature
– all we had created so far was static information which did not provide any kind of interactivity
to the learner. Our next goal was to create a third module which should provide this missing
interactivity by offering a variety of exercises. Unfortunately this goal contained an obstacle
we had built up ourselves: what we wanted to create was some more than the usual. We
wanted to provide high-quality feedback in the sense of Noriko Nagata (Nagata and Swisher
1995): leaving “simple error messages” for providing “feedback which is more detailed and
informative”; we wanted the learner to interact, not only to react. That there is a need for
such kind of learning environments from a learner’s point of view can be proved looking at
disciplines concerned with the process of learning. In constructivist learning theories any kind
of knowledge acquisition depends on the active participation of the learner. There cannot be
any learning without the learner’s interest and involvement. In contrast to earlier learning
Multilingualism.indb 130 4-12-2006 12:26:22