![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
Abstract
The choice of grammatical framework in ICALL – the branch of CALL that applies artificial intelligence techniques – has important implications for both research and development. Matthews (Citation1993) argued for one ‘that potentially meshes with SLA (second language acquisition)’ (p. 5) and sketches three criteria that facilitate the crucial decision of selecting a grammatical framework for an ICALL system: computational effectiveness, linguistic perspicuity and acquisitional perspicuity. We will use Matthews' three adequacy criteria to review recent research in construction grammar and propose its application in ICALL, particularly in projects which involve the building of a student model. Such a student modeling project – Mocha – will be sketched briefly to provide a concrete context for the conceptualisation and implementation of construction grammar. This grammatical framework has the potential to help overcome some challenges in ICALL and to facilitate a more thorough analysis of learner language in context and thus improve our knowledge about language learning processes.
Notes
1. See Heift and Schulze (Citation2007, pp. 52–82) for an overview of ICALL projects.
2. The term construction is used inside and outside of CG, for instance in structuralism, generative grammar, and corpus linguistics (see Schönefeld, Citation2006 for a discussion). Here the term is only used to refer to the most essential concept of CG.
3. There is some relation to Frame Semantics (Fillmore, Citation1982) and to Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard & Sag, Citation1994; Sag, Wasow, & Bender, Citation2003). See for instance Riehemann (Citation2001).
4. It is with reference to full coverage that he wants the adjective ‘generative’ to be understood and not as an informal reference to ‘the family of GB [Government and Binding] related approaches’ (Kay, Citation1997, p. 124).
5. The concept of gradience in our view of construction grammar analysis of learner texts will be briefly outlined within the text.
6. Often such utterances contain multiple errors.
7. For an overview of different approaches to parsing ill-formed input in ICALL systems see Heift and Schulze (Citation2007, pp. 34–43).
8. Particularly the concept of grammar as a complex, dynamic (emergent) system in Fluid CG (Steels, Citation2005).
9. For a discussion of our computational of complexity and accuracy see Schulze and Wood (Citation2008).
10. Principal investigator: Mathias Schulze; co-investigator: Trude Heift; the research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada; grant number 410-2007-2549.