WERTi

Working with English Real-Texts: An Intelligent Workbook for English

WERTi is an intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) system designed to provide supplementary language learning activity resources to ESL students. It can be viewed as an intelligent automatic workbook, providing an unlimited number of activities designed to foster awareness of English grammatical forms and functions. Because it is a web-based system, it can be used anywhere there is a computer with internet access.

The WERTi activities are automatically derived from authentic English texts, obtained from on-line news sites (or, in principle, specific corpora). Learners can choose the texts they want to work with on the basis of web searches for topics of their choosing, and can generate as many activity pages as they wish.

WERTi uses state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to generate exercises, identifying targeted lexical and phrasal material through a combination of tokenization, lemmatization, morphological analysis, part of speech tagging, and shallow parsing. For the type of activities currently being implemented, the focus in WERTi is on creative and efficient use of existing freely available NLP technology.

The activity types WERTi provides follow a pedagogically motivated progression from receptive presentation, to productive presentation, to controlled practice. Specifically, activities include the coloring of targeted forms by the system, having the learner find and click on targeted forms, and finally, controlled practice activities such as fill-in-the-blank or editing tasks. WERTi provides these activity progressions for a variety of grammar topics.

Please note that the current version is a very limited first prototype
that is only intended to exemplify work in progress.

The following slides of our recent CALICO and EUROCALL talks provide some context and discuss the direction of our current research:

  • Luiz Amaral, Vanessa Metcalf and Detmar Meurers: "Language Awareness through Re-use of NLP Technology." Pre-conference Workshop on NLP in CALL -- Computational and Linguistic Challenges. CALICO 2006. May 17, 2006. University of Hawaii. (slides)
  • Vanessa Metcalf and Detmar Meurers: "Generating Web-based English Preposition Exercises from Real-World Texts." EUROCALL 2006. Granada, Spain. September 4--7, 2006. (slides)