Constructing English Reading Courseware

Constructing English Reading Courseware Masao Utiyama National Institute of Information and Communications Technology 3-5 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto, 619-0289 Japan mutiyama@nict.go.jp Midori Tanimura Kinki University 3-4-1 Kowakae, Higashi-Osaka City, 577-8502 Japan tani@hat.hi-ho.ne.jp Hitoshi Isahara National Institute of Information and Communications Technology 3-5 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto, 619-0289 Japan isahara@nict.go.jp Abstract There is a wide range of English reading materials for EFL (English as a foreign language) learners. However, it is difficult for teachers to select appropriate materials to construct course- ware that can be used for an English course. We propose a method for constructing courseware from a target vocabulary and a corpus. We used the specialized vocabulary for the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) and articles from The Daily Yomiuri news- paper to construct effective courseware. The constructed courseware consisted of articles in which the target vocabulary frequently occurred. Evaluation of the constructed courseware is ongoing. However, students have accepted it as an effective tool for learning the TOEIC vocabulary from real texts. 1 Introduction There is a huge range of English reading materials for EFL (English as a foreign language) learners on the Internet. For example, current news stories can be read on web sites such as those of CNN,1 TIME,2 or the BBC.3 Specialized reading materials for EFL learners are also provided at web sites like EFL Reading.4 Given the vast amount of available reading materials, EFL teachers have to carefully select the most appropriate text to use in reading courseware for teaching English reading efficiently. Efficient teaching includes promoting the acquisition of new words, phrases, and/or syntax through reading. Our goal is to construct reading courseware automatically from a set of reading materials (a corpus) with the aim of achieving a specific course objective. The objective examined in this paper is the acqui- sition of vocabulary. We define efficiency in terms of the amount of reading materials that must be read to learn a required vocabulary. That is, efficient courseware is as short as possible, while containing the required vocabulary. Automatic construction of courseware will be especially useful in preparing materials for ESP (En- glish for special purposes) courses. ESP teachers would benefit greatly if they could construct efficient courseware automatically from a corpus and a specialized vocabulary of a particular discipline such as medicine, engineering, or economics. 2 Construction of courseware using an optimization process Given a target vocabulary V to be learned and a corpus D that consists of reading materials, the course- ware5 C must satisfy two conditions: 1http://www.cnn.com/ 2http://www.time.com/time/ 3http://www.bbc.co.uk/ 4http://www.gradedreading.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ 5Courseware usually includes software in addition to other materials. However, in this paper, the term courseware is used to refer to the reading materials only. PACLIC 18, December 8th-10th, 2004, Waseda University, Tokyo - 173 - Condition 1 C is a subset of D. Condition 2 C covers V , i.e., each word in V occurs at least once in a document in C. The most efficient courseware ˆC is obtained by solving an optimization problem defined as ˆC …

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