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<Paper uid="W04-1710">
  <Title>The Syntax Student's Companion: an eLearning Tool designed for (Computational) Linguistics Students</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Doing exercises to manipulate the concepts taught in a course is essential to both teachers and students. While the former want to ensure that their students have a good grasp of the material that they teach them, the latter often want to illustrate that material with some concrete practice. Linguistics or computational linguistics students who are introduced to the intricacies of grammar are no less concerned than any others. A typical exercise consists in asking students to analyze a sentence by means of its description as a syntactic tree.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In introductory courses, either a context-free grammar is given to them before the exercise begins, or they have to build one of their own that can be used to analyze the sentence given. Obviously, the more exercises look like challenging \games&amp;quot; and the more they are easy to use and accessible, the more likely students are to invest time and efiort in trying to do them (see e.g. (van Halteren, 2002; Gibbon and Carson-Berndsen, 1999)). If they spend a lot of time drawing, erasing parts of their trees, drawing them again or correcting them, and then waiting for minutes before their teaching assistant is available again, they may not flnd the whole exercise very captivating very long. But this type of exercise is essential to understand how the most basic of grammar formalism works and therefore to build a solid ground for the study of language analysis.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Computers play a growing role in education, as the number of workshops dedicated to eLearning and related domains shows.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> While many institutions experience flnancial cuts, often re ected in the reduction of the time devoted to supervised work, the use of computer support has also its roots in other reasons. It should be clear that computer tools are not meant to dispense entirely with teachers, but rather to have them concentrate on the pedagogical content. Machines are good at supporting well-deflned tasks, and can therefore allow students to practise concepts that have been encoded into a well designed computer program. The issues of what type of practice can be done in a satisfactory manner with computers today and of the extent to which it can actually help students or assess their performance are open to debate and the object of research. Importantly to us, past projects have shown that the computer-assisted learning of syntax can produce a high level of engagement by students (e.g.(Larson, 1996)).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> This paper concentrates more on the student's perspective, inspired from the author's own experience as a former computer science student taking courses in linguistics. The flrst section presents the motivating reasons for the creation of a computer program intended to support the practice of syntax exercises. The program is described and its use is illustrated by concrete examples. Preliminary elements of evaluation are inferred from the use of the program by university students and teachers, showing that this type of support yields promising results in spite of a few issues. We then present our current work by describing the design of a new version of the program, where modularity and extensibility play a central role. It is hoped that this new version will be more suited to both students' and teachers' needs, and that this practical experience will contribute to the development of the fleld of computer-assisted learning. We flnally propose several tracks for the evolution of this type of tool.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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