Teaching Syntax with CLARIN Corpora and Resources

Abstract

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has brought online learning to the forefront for learners and teachers. As a consequence, the demand for self-paced and adaptive learning resources has reached unprecedented levels. Fortunately, universities had been using e-learning platforms such as Moodle, or other SCORM-compliant LMS, which has helped make the transition from onsite to on-line learning. However, teachers still have had to design and implement assessment activities in the form of self-correcting activities (true/false, multiple answer questions, mark the words, fill in the blanks questions, etc.). This step has proved to be a major hurdle in the on-site to on-line learning transition, since designing and, most of all, manually editing formative and evaluative assessment activities is a very labour-intensive task. In this article, we present a framework that takes advantage of the corpora and resources available from the LINDAT / CLARIAH-CZ Data & Tools platform in order to generate quizzes and other activities related to syntax. After some background on using NLP for teaching grammar, we present our corpus-to-quiz processing chain, and we outline preliminary results on deploying automatically generated French syntax quizzes in the classroom.