Improving the Language Mastery through Responsive Environments

This paper is devoted to a way of intending to improve the language mastery of students in every subject and in a broad range of education levels by using computer-based tools involving linguistic resources. Lexicon concepts useful for language learning are involved in dictionaries and other kinds of linguistic resources. These concepts (vocabulary, meanings, semantic categories, semantic relationships, and taxonomy) are pointed out. Claim is made for using new environments and computer-human interfaces based on these concepts which define the pedagogical goals. Envisioning the foreseen collaborative instruction tasks, claim is made for the constructionist model of learning. Authoring and consulting electronic linguistic resources are the main tasks to reach the defined goals. The conceptual model appropriate for developing any software system taking into account all these principles is discussed, and the reached entity-relationship model is presented. We further present the developed tools for creating bilingual linguistic resources, which could allow to reach the foreseen learning goals. The authoring tool supports consistency of the intended semantics of the lexicon and enables to detect omissions and inconsistencies, and the user tool is a graphical user interface for queries. These tools can be advantageously used in language teaching. Computers should improve learning and teaching into the classroom Shneiderman, 1995 [1]