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

Quantity OR quality – an inevitable dilemma in innovative CALL systems?
of many exercises gives the possibility to train a concept on various quizzes, which would allow
a deep embedding of the concept in the mental lexicon.
Gap fi lling exercises can be created out of the text corpus, hence, the texts could not only
be read but also interactively trained, possibly by clicking on a button immediately below the
text. The gapped text could appear in a separate window, the removed words could be given in
the infi nitive form next to the text, etc.
Selected pieces of the didactic data and the corresponding exercises could be combined in
order to provide a feature we call adaptive contextualized vocabulary acquisition (Gamper and
Knapp 2002a).
9. Related Work
The exercise module of ELDIT is different to similar approaches regarding the following
characteristics: We tried to develop an exercise module that provides quality and quantity at
the same time. This is different to most of the other approaches, which provide either a very
easy way to develop and apply a large number of quizzes (Godwin-Jones 2001, Holmes 2006)
or a very sophisticated way in the development of a few exercises and their completion (Toole
and Heift 2002).
In several projects gap fi lling exercises can be created automatically out of existing data
(Webster 2006, Streiter et al. 2004, Verlinde 2006). However, the underlying text data are
often reused from unstructured text corpora or have been submitted by the user. The data in
ELDIT is on one hand didactically valuable, since it has been carefully developed according to
modern psycholinguistic and didactic ideas, and on the other hand technologically valuable,
since it has additionally been elaborated electronically in a very sophisticated way. This double
innovative approach gives the possibility to provide a large amount of supporting features in the
generation step, an add-on that is sometimes missing in similar projects.
In ELDIT structured language resources are used to enlarge both, the variety of exercises as
well as the correction possibilities, an approach that has been proposed several times by the
developers of these resources but rarely applied in real projects (ten Hacken and Tschichold
2001, Kunze and Lemnitzer 2002).
In many innovative systems although intelligent mechanisms are applied in one or more
steps of the work fl ow, a large amount of exercise data together with alternative correct
and wrong input must be stored by the content authors (Toole and Heift 2002). In our system
up to now no specifi c exercise data has been hard coded, which on one hand reduces the
burden for the content developers and on the other hand keeps the system open and fl exible
also for the future. The strong modular approach in the system development of ELDIT allows
easily including further modules in order to continuously increase the richness of the data and
software features and hence the possibilities to program new exercises.
Many exercise tools have reached a very high standard (DeSmedt, W. H. 1995, Toole and Heift
2002), but one can note that on the commercial market almost no CALL systems with intelligent
exercises are available. A possible answer may be that because of the diffi cult implementation
process, many systems just focus on this single aspect of language learning. Providing practicing
activities in an isolated way, however, may be too less for a comprehensive language learning
experience. The module in ELDIT is not used in an isolated way but included into a general
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