Teaching Aid for Grammatical Awareness, Recognition and Enhancement of Linguistic Abilities TAGARELA is an intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) system designed to be fully integrated into the Portuguese Individualized Instruction Program at The Ohio State University. Originally created at OSU, it is now further developed at Tübingen University and employed in Portuguese courses at UMASS Amherst. TAGARELA can be viewed as an intelligent automatic workbook that provides students with opportunities to practice their reading, listening, and writing skills. Because it is a web-based system, it can be used anywhere there is a computer with internet access. TAGARELA uses state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to analyze students' input, and detect spelling, morphological, syntactic and semantic errors. Its NLP components allow the system to handle activities that go beyond the usual multiple choice or fill-in-the-blanks used by regular CALL systems. Its exercise types are similar to the ones typically found in current workbooks, such as: - listening and reading comprehension
- picture description
- vocabulary practice
- phrasing and re-writing
TAGARELA has a student model that keeps track of each student's individual performance, and an instructor model that carries information about activity and error types. Together the student and instructor models allow the system to choose the best feedback strategy to use with each individual learner based on the level of the activity, type of task, characteristics of error, and learner profile. At Tübingen University, TAGARELA was subsequently re-implemented in the UIMA framework. The new version retains the full functionality of the first TAGARELA and offers the following new capabilities: - True extensible annotation-based processing
- Adaptation to activities based on information from the activity model
- Adaptation of feedback for individual students based on basic student modeling
The Ohio State University has the longest running individualized language programs in the country. With TAGARELA, OSU is the first university to have an ICALL system with NLP technology specifically designed to fulfill the needs of students in such language programs. The system was successfully used by the students in individualized instruction and regular Portuguese courses at OSU in Spring 2007. This project was funded 2005-2007 by an Arts and Humanities Grant for Innovation under the project title "Bridging the Gap between Research in Natural Language Processing and Individualized Language Instruction." |