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-------- Weitergeleitete Nachricht --------
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<td>[SCLA] Announcing the SMARTool for learners of Russian</td>
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<th valign="BASELINE" nowrap="nowrap" align="RIGHT">Datum: </th>
<td>Fri, 7 Feb 2020 08:50:06 +0000</td>
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<th valign="BASELINE" nowrap="nowrap" align="RIGHT">Von: </th>
<td>Laura A Janda <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:laura.janda@uit.no"><laura.janda@uit.no></a></td>
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<td><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:scla@lists.fas.harvard.edu">scla@lists.fas.harvard.edu</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:scla@lists.fas.harvard.edu"><scla@lists.fas.harvard.edu></a></td>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Announcing the SMARTool
for learners of Russian (Strategic Mastery in Acquiring Rich
morphology Tool), a free open-source resource you can find
here:
</span><a href="https://smartool.github.io/smartool-rus-eng/"
moz-do-not-send="true"><span lang="EN-US">https://smartool.github.io/smartool-rus-eng/</span></a><span
lang="EN-US">.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">SMARTools: Strategic
Mastery in Acquiring Rich morphology: Tools for language
learning<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Many languages have
“rich morphology”, meaning that words can have many
different forms to signal grammatical categories such as
case, number, tense, etc. Rich morphology presents a
challenge for second language learners because even a basic
vocabulary of a few thousand words can entail mastery of
over a hundred thousand word forms. This is particularly the
case with Slavic languages like Polish, Czech, Slovak, and
Croatian, Baltic languages like Lithuanian and Latvian, and
Uralic languages like Finnish and Estonian, but not
irrelevant for a Romance language like Spanish with large
paradigms for verbs. However, only a handful of the
potential forms of any given word occur frequently, while
the remainder are rare (some vanishingly so).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Now that linguists have
digital collections of language samples known as “corpora”
it is possible to scientifically determine which forms of
any given word are of highest frequency, as well as what
grammatical and collocational contexts motivate those few
frequent forms. This makes it possible to strategically
focus language learning in a new way and make new tools
available to the public. This new approach has been realized
for 3000 vocabulary items in the SMARTool for Russian for
English-speaking learners: </span><a
href="https://smartool.github.io/smartool-rus-eng/"
moz-do-not-send="true"><span style="font-family:"Times
New Roman",serif" lang="EN-US">https://smartool.github.io/smartool-rus-eng/</span></a><span
style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"
lang="EN-US">. A computational learning experiment gives
evidence that this approach is better than expecting
learners to memorize entire paradigms of forms.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif" lang="EN-US">A proposal for a SMARTools
COST Action (EU funding) is underway to coordinate
implementation of SMARTools for languages of Europe and
beyond with digital tools that are free and open-source.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt" lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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