Teaching the English Tense: Integrating Naive and Formal Grammars in an Intelligent Tutor for Foreign Language Teaching

• ~ • TEACHING THE ENGLISH TENSE: INTEGRATING NAIVE AND FORMAL GRAMMARS IN AN INTELLIGENT TUTOR FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING Danilo Fum 1, Bruno Pani 2 and Carlo Tasso 2 1 Dipartimento di Psicologia - Universit~ di Trieste, via delrUniversifi 7, 1-34123 Trieste (Italy) - fum@ uts882.units.infn.it.bitnet 2 Laboratorio di Intelligenza Artificiale - Universith di Udine, via Zanon 6, 1-33100 Udine (Italy) - tasso@ uduniv.infn.it.bimet ABSTRACT A basic problem that must be dealt with in order to build an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) in the domain of foreign language teaching is that of establishing what kind of grammatical knowledge has to be included in the domain expert module. Two basic options are possible: (i) to use a naive or pedagogical grammar, comprising knowledge derived from textbooks and school grammars or (ii) to use one of the formal grammars developed by theoretical and computational linguists. The paper discusses the relationships between naive and formal grammars in foreign language teaching :and presents, as a case study, an attempt to integrate the two approaches within ET (English Tutor), an ITS aimed at helping Italian students master English verb usage. More particularly, the paper focuses on the possibility of integrating a naive grammar into a systemic framework. The reliability of the proposed approach is currently being evaluated by means of a series of computational experiments with the Verb Generation Expert of ET. INTRODUCTION A problem that must be dealt with in order to build an ITS in the domain of foreign language teaching is that of establishing what kind of grammatical knowledge has to be included in the Domain Expert module. At first sight, two distinct options are possible: a) to utilize the knowledge contained in textbooks and school grammars; b) to adopt one of the formal grammars developed by theoretical and computational linguists. Both these solutions have their shortcomings. Traditional grammar textbooks have serious drawbacks which concern both their content and the way it is presented to the student. The introduction of the notional syllabuses and the almost general adoption of the communicative approach have somehow changed the general attitude and the strategies utilized in foreign language teaching, but even the grammars that follow these methodologies do not overcome the most severe limitation of what we call the naive approach to the representation of linguistic knowledge, i.e., the incapacity to provide a global and coherent model of language. The formal grammars developed by linguists, on the other hand, show their shortcomings when we try to use them directly for didactic purposes. The point is that these grammars have been developed to pursue goals that are different from those of school :grammars. Theoretical linguists are in fact interested in providing mathematically well defined descriptions of a language which capture the competence of a native speaker. Computational linguists are interested in discovering computationally effective models of the processes that allow the speaker to utter or to understand a sentence in that language. Considered from the point of view of a foreign language teacher, these formal …

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