Parametrizable exercise generation from authentic texts: Effectively targeting the language means on the curriculum

Abstract

We present a parametrizable approach to exercise generation from authentic texts that addresses the need for digital materials designed to practice the language means on the curriculum in a real-life school setting. The tool builds on a language-aware search engine that helps identify attractive texts rich in the language means to be practiced. Making use of state-of-the-art NLP, the relevant learning targets are identified and transformed into exercise items embedded in the original context. While the language-aware search engine ensures that these contexts match the learner‘s interests based on the search term used, and the linguistic parametrization of the system then reranks the results to prioritize texts that richly represent the learning targets, for the exercise generation to proceed on this basis, an interactive configuration panel allows users to adjust exercise complexity through a range of parameters specifying both properties of the source sentences and of the exercises. An evaluation of exercises generated from web documents for a representative sample of language means selected from the English curriculum of 7th grade in German secondary school showed that the combination of language-aware search and exercise generation successfully facilitates the process of generating exercises from authentic texts that support practice of the pedagogical targets.