Facet and Prism based Model for Pedagogical Indexation of Texts for Language Learning - The Consequences of the Notion of Pedagogical Context

In this article, we discuss the problem of pedagogical indexation of texts for language learning and address it under the scope of the notion of “pedagogical context”. This prompts us to propose a new version of a model based on a couple formed of two entities : prisms and facets. We first evoke the importance of material selection in the task of planing a language class in order to introduce our point of view of Yinger’s model of planing applied to language teacher’s search of texts. This is closely intermingled with the elaboration of the notion of pedagogical context from which our model stem. This version though in a way similar to our first attempt provides sounder notions on which to build on. 1 PEDAGOGICAL INDEXATION 1.1 The MIRTO Project The MIRTO project, started in 2001, stemmed from the observation of various recurrent issues in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) systems: rigidity, inability to adapt the learning sequences to the learners and the necessary adaptation of teachers who are not provided with means to manipulate concepts pertaining to their field of expertise (language didactics) (Antoniadis et al., 2004). The aim of Multiapprentissages Interactifs par des Recherches sur des Textes et l’Oral (MIRTO) was to promote the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in order to address those problems by adding an abstraction layer between the user and the material he/she manipulates. Indeed, they consider that to allow teachers to formulate their problems in didactics relevant terms, language should not be handled as character sequences but as a system of forms and concepts (Antoniadis et al., 2005). In order to do so, MIRTO proposes to separate treatments (e.g. gap-filling exercise generation script) and the data on which they are to be applied (a text in this case). 1.2 Definition and Objectives This made evident the need for a text base, which, for consistency’s sake, would have to allow user’s to perform language teaching driven queries. In other words, a subpart of the problem was the conception of a system that could perform pedagogical indexation of texts. In this work we defined pedagogical indexation as “an indexation performed according to a documentary language that allows users to query for objects in order to use them for teaching” (Loiseau, 2009). Considering the aforementioned context, we are therefore working towards pedagogical indexation of texts for language learning. Indeed, a study of the literature concerning the most often used language teaching methods and a series of interviews with some language teachers prompted us not only to consider this problem in the context of the future use of the text in a CALL activity, but to try to consider the problem globally: few of the teachers we had interviewed were really computer savvy, all the same, they all underlined the importance of text search in their practices. We later got confirmation of this nature of things by a larger scale study, which established text search as a common task in language teaching (Loiseau, 2009). Having modified the scope of our work – without completely cutting ties with MIRTO, for integration remained a perspective – into the conception of