Naive vs. Formal Grammars: A Case for Integration in the Design of a Foreign Language Tutor

The relationship between formal and naive (i.e., used for didactic purposes) grammars in foreign language teaching is dealt with in the paper which presents, as a case study, an attempt to integrate the two approaches within an intelligent tutoring system. This work has been carried on in the framework of the ET (English Tutor) project whose long term goal is the development of a tutoring system aimed at helping Italian students master English verb tenses. Within the project, a prototype system based on a naive approach to the grammar of tense has been built. The experimentation performed with the prototype provided the motivation for a critical re-evaluation and revision of some of the assumptions which it was grounded upon. The possibility of integrating some naive intuitions into a systemic representation of grammatical knowledge is discussed in the paper, and a new version of the domain expert module exploiting the systemic approach to tense selection is illustrated.

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