Conference article

Lärka: From Language Learning Platform to Infrastructure for Research on Language Learning

David Alfter
Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Lars Borin
Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Ildikó Pilán
Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Therese Lindström Tiedemann
Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland

Elena Volodina
Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

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Published in: Selected papers from the CLARIN Annual Conference 2018, Pisa, 8-10 October 2018

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 159:1, p. 1-14

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Published: 2019-05-28

ISBN: 978-91-7685-034-3

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

Lärka is an Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) platform developed at Språkbanken, as a flexible and a valuable source of additional learning material (e.g. via corpusbased exercises) and a support tool for both teachers and L2 learners of Swedish and students of (Swedish) linguistics. Nowadays, Lärka is being adapted into a building block in an emerging second language research infrastructure within a larger context of the text-based research infrastructure developed by the national Swedish Language bank, Språkbanken, and SWE-CLARIN. Lärka has recently received a new responsive user interface adapted to different devices with different screen sizes. Moreover, the system has also been augmented with new functionalities. These recent additions aim at improving the usability and the usefulness of the platform for pedagogical purposes. The most important development, though, is the adaptation of the platform to serve as a component in an e-infrastructure supporting research on language learning and multilingualism. Thanks to Lärka’s service-oriented architecture, most functionalities are also available as web services which can be easily re-used by other applications.

Keywords

ICALL, Infrastructure, Language learning, Swedish, SweCLARIN

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