Juan Rafael Zamorano Mansilla: Thesis project description

The purpose of this research is to explore the possible applications that multilingual generation grammar has to offer in the field of language teaching. It is therefore a research that belongs in the area of applied linguistics, but taking advantage of the advances produced by computational grammar in the last decades.

The general purpose of this research is to look into the matter of possible applications of multilingual generation grammars in language teaching. In particular, the research will take the Grammar Development Environment (GDE) KPML, developed for multilingual sentence generation with computational systemic-functional grammars, and explore its potential application.

More specific goals can be formulated as a number of questions such as the following:

1. GDE’s are machines primarily built for the task of developing linguistic resources, generation and analysis. But could they also be useful for the language teaching?
2. In case GDE’s are useful for language teaching, what types of language teaching can benefit most from GDE’s?
3. What group of learners is more likely to find advantages in the use of GDE’s for teaching purposes?
4. What part/tool/operation/characteristic of GDE’s is particularly useful for language teaching? Why? Is there a difference in the answer to this question motivated by variation in the characteristics of the learners or the type of language teaching?
5. What are the disadvantages of GDE’s for language teaching? Can they be removed?
6. Are there any changes that could be introduced in GDE’s to make them more suitable to learners needs?

All of these questions will be addressed in this project using the GDE KPML, concentrating on the languages Spanish and English. Substantial linguistic resources (generation grammars) will be created as required.

See the complete thesis proposal (pdf) for more details.