Gap-fill Tests for Language Learners: Corpus-Driven Item Generation

Simon Smith, P.V.S. Avinesh, Adam Kilgarriff

    Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

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    Abstract

    Gap-fill exercises have an important role in language teaching. They allow students to demonstrate that they understand vocabulary in context, discouraging memorisation of translations. It is time consuming and difficult for item writers to create good test items, and even then test items are open to Sinclair’s critique of invented examples. We present a system,TEDDCLOG, which automatically generates draft test items from a corpus. TEDDCLOG takes the key (the word which will form the correct answer to the exercise) as input. It finds distractors (the alternative, wrong answers for the multiplechoice question) from a distributional thesaurus, and identifies a collocate of the key that does not occur with the distractors. Next it finds a simple corpus sentence containing
    the key and collocate. The system then presents the sentences and distractors
    to the user for approval, modification or rejection. The system is implemented using the API to the Sketch Engine, a leading corpus query system. We compare TEDDCLOG with other gap-fill-generation systems, and offer a partial evaluation of the results.
    Key Words: gap-fill, Sketch Engine, corpus linguistics, ELT, GDEX, proficiency
    testing
    Original languageEnglish
    Number of pages7
    Publication statusPublished - 2010

    Bibliographical note

    The attached paper is also available online on the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (India) website at: http://web.iiit.ac.in/~avinesh/papers/TeddclogICON2010.pdf. The paper was given at the ICON-2010: 8th International Conference on Natural Language Processing, Kharagpur, India. The full proceedings have been published by Macmillan Publishers, India - http://www.macmillanindia.com.

    Keywords

    • gap-fill
    • Sketch Engine
    • corpus
    • linguistics
    • ELT
    • GDEX
    • proficiency
    • testing

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