Commentaires
Plan
Online hypermedia contents for learning and practicing foreign languages
Michel Plu, Christine Chardenon, Laurent Maupeu
France Telecom R&D Lannion FRANCE
The Idea
World wide networks give access to thousands of lively multilingual audiovisual  resources
Digital technology facilitates the management and use of accessible resources
A real opportunity to teach foreign languages with more diverse, interesting and up-to-date audiovisual resources
The power of images
Let pupils choose the contents they really appreciate
 Raise motivation, a key to education
Yes, good idea but …
Using videos sometimes raises copyright and legal issues
More and more materials become  free of use for education purposes
Searching videos is time-consuming
Indexation is hard , inaccurate  or expensive
Choosing videos is longer than choosing text
Audiovisual resources are often harder to understand than written text
Lots of fun, but what do students really learn ?
Formal knowledge has also to be taught with more « conventional » activities
SMAELLE
An experimental online service available via the web to help teachers to
Take advantage of the multiple resources  available to build original, customized multimedia sessions
Find the appropriate resources according to the skill levels of their pupils and their pedagogical objectives
Build pedagogical materials that pupils can understand
Motivate their pupils with lively and funny activities
Integrate conventional activities like grammar exercises with multimedia sessions
Using broadcasted closed-captioned  videos
Facilities provided
Video search engine with pedagogical criteria
According to
Speed of speech
Level of vocabulary used
Syntactic patterns or grammar forms to be learned
Combined with classical  keyword based search
Help for navigating into the video
To have  the current spoken sentence being repeated or grammar patterns being searched
Markers can be set to let pupils go to these sentences
Help for understanding  vocabulary
With controlled access to dictionary definition
Tools to generate “gap-fill” exercises from the closed-caption text of the videos
Diapositive 6
Diapositive 7
Architecture
Video content processing
Record  only closed-captioned broadcasted contents with a set top box
Split them up into short clips
Extract closed-caption text from the videos
Generate ascii file with time code information
One day closed caption might be automatically generated with “speech to text technology”
Encode broadcasted videos in order to stream them into a server
Closed-caption processing
The closed caption text is parsed and processed with a Natural Language Processing Tool
Paragraphs, sentences and words are identified
Each word is tagged with
Its lemma , part-of speech, and morpho-syntactic properties:
 like number, person, form, tense, mode for verbs, positive, negative superlative for adjectives …
Time codes are tagged like specific keywords
Result is in XML
Video indexing
Parse XML file to compute pedagogical indexes
Difficulty to understand  the video
Speed of speech
 based on the average number of word syllables pronounced between two time codes
 Vocabulary level
 Percentage  of spoken words in the video in list of words corresponding to skill level in the language
Grammar profile
 number of times a specific grammar form or syntactic pattern is found in the NLP result
These indexes are used by the teacher to select videos
adapted to their pupils’ skills or their pedagogical objectives
Hypermedia video generation
Integration of synchronized closed caption text and streamed video
Generation of a  SMIL and RealText™ formatted file
The RealText™ closed caption is augmented with :
A navigation arrow to rewind from one sentence to another
 Each time a new sentence is detected the time code associated to the navigation arrow is modified
Links to go to a specific sentence with a particular grammar form
Links with difficult words to textual definitions from an online dictionary
 Each entry has its own URL
 Use list of commonly known words
 Use NLP result to find the right entry in the dictionary
SMIL files of selected videos are customized online, retrieved and stored onto the school server
Exercises generation
For each closed-caption text several HTML “gap-fill” exercises are generated
Use of pattern substitution rules to generate an HTML form
 replace specific grammar or syntactic patterns with an input field
Generation of indication to fill the gap
 lemma form of the replaced words and morpho-syntactic properties found
Evaluation of the answers by a script on the http server
 comparing input text with original form found  in the text
Several kinds of exercises can be generated
Verbs, adjectives with comparative or superlative form, prepositions
Exercises can be retrieved and edited by teachers and stored onto the school server
Experiments
12 teachers
College teacher , and teachers for adults in companies
Global satisfaction and very promising but:
Distinguish skill levels of vocabulary and targeted audience of the video
 Example : some cartoons are easy to understand for adult learner but unfortunately are targeted to young children
Other criteria : Number of people speaking,background noise, accent …
Some contents are more or less adapted
 Cartoons for the young
 Music depends on pupils’ tastes
 News is rapidly out of date
Particularly adapted to adult training sessions
With appropriate materials
Conclusions
Networks can provide diverse audiovisual contents to learn foreign languages
Digital technology can help teachers to use these new contents efficiently
Closed-captioning is not only important for people with hard hearing difficulties, but can also provide support for education abroad
Online Multimedia development will certainly raise new ways of teaching foreign languages
It’s only the beginning
Adding modernity to modern language teaching