Sorry, this got away before I added the rest of the recipients.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 10:25 PM Subject: Re: 9.1 proposal: Language learning on the XO. To: Chris Ball <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 4:46 PM, Chris Ball <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm learning Spanish at the moment, and I wish the XO made it easier > for me. I don't have any knowledge of what the right way to do either > conventional or constructionist language learning on computers is; if > anyone has much experience with either, I'd love to hear about it. http://pagesperso-orange.fr/une.education.pour.demain/materiels_pedago/sw/swprese.htm Caleb Gattegno: The Silent Way The Silent Way is the pedagogical approach created by Gattegno for teaching foreign languages; the objective is for students to work as autonomous language learners. > I have some obvious candidates for software that could be produced in > mind: > > * A method -- similar to Scott's recent GtkLabel overlay for allowing > strings inside Sugar and activities to be translated -- that does a > dictionary lookup of a word on the screen and overlays the > translation of that word into a local language. This should be > activity-agnostic, if possible. For bonus points, translate > phrases instead of just words. I worked once for Sentius Corp., which had such software for providing either translations or definitions through pop-up "portlets". This kind of software is in wide use. Sites such as translate.google.com and http://www.popjisyo.com/WebHint/Portal_e.aspx or http://www.rikai.com offer various ways of doing this, including copy and paste, or entering a URL to get a version of a page annotated dynamically. > * Perhaps some kind of Pronunciation Activity that gives you words > in the target language, speaks them to you, explains what they > mean in your local language, and asks you to speak them back, > perhaps grading your response? (All but the last part is already > possible to do manually in the Words activity, but not in a > structured way.) Our text-to-speech engine will be available for all Activities. In addition to speaking selected text in any supported language, it will highlight the point of pronunciation as it reads. It can be adapted to a language lesson Activity. > * Is there any free content that matches iconic images to words, > so that language vocabulary could be taught even without textual > translation to a local language? We ought to be able to combine Google Translate and Google Images using Google APIs. There are a number of picture dictionaries or visual dictionaries, in which all of the parts of an object are labeled in the target language. We could ask for a license, or create our own. We could throw a draft together out of free clip art in fairly short order, and get our artists to do something even better for global publication. > Feel free to come up with questions/ideas around language learning on > the XO in general in this thread, and they'll make it into the > conference talk. There is a substantial body of Free Software for language learning, and other Computational Linguistics software that could be adapted to language learning. o Content: Literature; man pages and other documentation; localization files o Dictionaries o Typing tutors for various writing systems o Kana drill and practice o Flashcard programs usable for vocabulary, simple grammar drills (plurals, genders, tenses) and somewhat more. o Spelling and grammar checkers What we need most is a Transformational Grammar engine to drill more advanced constructions. >From simple transformations, such as "I am going out."-->"We are going out." to such things as counterfactual conditionals. "He went."-->"Had he gone..." or "If he had gone...", including different patterns for the formal, even the old-fashioned (to prepare students for literature) and the more colloquial. Or dialect. "If'n he went...", if a student so chooses. A quite decent summary of some of the development of this field is in >From algorithms to generative grammar and back again http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/goldsmith/Papers/CLS2004Algorithms.pdf, by John Goldsmith, The University of Chicago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Goldsmith http://hum.uchicago.edu/~jagoldsm/Webpage/index.html The author describes one of his research interests as "unsupervised learning of morphology". Unfortunately for us, that means unsupervised computers attempting to analyse word structure, with a 70-80% success rate measured by words in the corpus. It has nothing to do with human learning or the grammar of sentences. An algorithm for the unsupervised learning of morphology http://hum.uchicago.edu/~jagoldsm/Papers/algorithm.pdf Abstract This paper describes in detail an algorithm for the unsupervised learning of natural lan- guage morphology, with emphasis on challenges that are encountered in languages typolog- ically similar to European languages. It utilizes the Minimum Description Length analysis described in Goldsmith (2001), and has been implemented in software that is available for downloading and testing. "The executable for this program, and the source code as well, is available at http://linguistica.uchicago.edu." The conclusion we should draw is that in its full generality, these are very hard problems, which we have barely made a beginning on. I would suggest that for selected semi-formal grammars, of the kind commonly taught in textbooks for foreign students, it might be a reasonable task. Basically, we remove nearly all of the colloquial, and teach only the stuff that has known rules. Given a sufficient research impetus, we can expect to make fairly rapid progress for some considerable time in extending our analysis and teaching methods to ever larger corpora of published and spoken or sung material. We must exclude at any given moment the unconquered edge cases, such as certain kinds of obscure humor, or James Joyce and the current post-post-modernists. I think that they can safely be left to the advanced classes in any case. If we can get our students to be fluent in the few hundred cases in published transformational grammars of English, with the common irregular verbs and plurals, and a set of daily-use idioms, nobody can complain. (Well, actually, they can, and they will, but I will feel free to ignore them. ;->) I'll ask Goldsmith whether he would be interested in joining our discussion, and whether he knows of relevant R&D. > Thanks, > > - Chris. > -- > Chris Ball <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > _______________________________________________ > Devel mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai Give One, Get One, from Nov. 17 http://www.amazon.com/xo http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Giving/International _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list Sugar@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar