From Receptive to Productive: Learning to Use Confusing Words through Automatically Selected Example Sentences
This addresses language learning for students by improving productive skills, but it is incremental as it builds on existing systems and tasks.
The paper tackles the problem of helping students learn to use confusing words appropriately in sentence translation tasks, showing that students made substantial progress in sentence structure and highly proficient students benefited more.
Knowing how to use words appropriately has been a key to improving language proficiency. Previous studies typically discuss how students learn receptively to select the correct candidate from a set of confusing words in the fill-in-the-blank task where specific context is given. In this paper, we go one step further, assisting students to learn to use confusing words appropriately in a productive task: sentence translation. We leverage the GiveMeExample system, which suggests example sentences for each confusing word, to achieve this goal. In this study, students learn to differentiate the confusing words by reading the example sentences, and then choose the appropriate word(s) to complete the sentence translation task. Results show students made substantial progress in terms of sentence structure. In addition, highly proficient students better managed to learn confusing words. In view of the influence of the first language on learners, we further propose an effective approach to improve the quality of the suggested sentences.