Using NLP to Support E nglish Teaching in Rural Schools (2022)

Abstract: We present a web application for creating games and exercises for teaching English as a foreign language with the help of NLP tools. The application contains different kinds of games such as crosswords, word searches, a memory game, and a multiplayer game based on the classic battleship pen and paper game. This application was built with the aim of supporting teachers in rural schools that are teaching English lessons, so they can easily create interactive and engaging activities for their students. We present the context and history of the project, the current state of the web application, and some ideas on how we will expand it in the future.

## introduction this paper presents an ongoing project on developing a web application that uses nlp tools for building exercises for teaching english as a foreign language (efl). the aim of the platform, called cinacina foot_0 , is to assist teachers in the creation of activities based on some topic or text they are working in the classroom. as we are a spanish speaking country, the universalization of english teaching throughout all primary schools is one of the objectives of the national public education administration in our country. some of the obstacles for achieving this goal in rural schools are the lack of qualified specialized teachers and the poor internet connectivity in rural areas, which renders solutions based on videoconferencing impractical for these purposes. consequently, a program was designed for these schools where classroom teachers, who may not have a good command of english, learn in conjunction with children, with remote support of english teachers. in this context, the application we are building is meant to be an aid to rural school teachers, providing exercises that could be used out of the box, tools for creating new ones, and an interactive platform with exercises and games that helps to motivate the kids learning the language. the rest of this document is structured as follows: section 2 presents related work and important concepts to understand the context of the project; section 3 introduces the history of the project, how and why we began creating it; section 4 describes the application built so far and its main features; section 5 presents the interactions we have had with the community and how it impacted the project; and finally section 6 shows some conclusions and future work. ## background the interest in educational applications has been present in the nlp area since its beginnings (litman, 2016), being the automatic correction of students' assignments one of the most explored topics. this interest has been increasing in the computational linguistics community, leading to the creation in 2017 of the association for computational linguistics special interest group for building educational applications (sigedu) foot_1 , which organizes an annual workshop specialized in this area, bea: workshop on innovative use of nlp for building educational applications. the bea workshop had its 17th edition foot_2 this year, associated with the naacl annual conference. within the area of educational nlp, particular work has been done on the application of nlp to language teaching, a sub-area that has received the name intelligent call or icall (call: computer assisted language learning) @xcite . there is an annual workshop associated with this area (nlp4call), which will have its 11th edition in 2022 4 . our work, framed in this sub-area of nlp for language teaching, focuses on the development of a platform of educational activities to support the teaching of english as a second language. an example of such an application for creating english exercises is language muse @xcite , which allows to select a text from a catalog, or use own texts, and generate from them exercises that evaluate morphological, syntactic or semantic concepts. a similar application but for multiple languages, revita, is presented in @xcite . in @xcite , the development of activities for vocabulary learning from transformations of children's stories using nlp tools is described. a work that has an approach closely related to ours is @xcite , which builds english exercises of different types, but mainly focused on learning collocations in english for more advanced students. ## description of the application we developed a web application that can be accessed by teachers and students. so far there are three types of users: students (with limited access), teachers (with more permissions like creating and managing games and exercises), and superusers that could also do administrative tasks. our intention is to make the application open source under the cc by-nc-sa 4.0 license. since the application is rapidly evolving as we regularly add new features and content, we are waiting to reach a stable version before releasing the code. for now the application is available to use and we are open for any suggestions. in the following sections we will describe only the most relevant content that is currently included. ## contact with the community as mentioned in section 2.2, an extension project involves many actors, and it must include an interaction, a dialogue between the university and the target community. it is expected that all actors are impacted in some way by the project. our main ways of interacting with the community in this project have been the visits to rural schools and the training sessions with rural school teachers. ## conclusions we presented an ongoing research and extension project that uses nlp tools for aiding english teaching in rural schools. we described several activities that are integrated in the web application: a tool for building crosswords, one for building word searches, a language practice game, a memory game, and a story game. there is also a multiplayer game inspired in the well-known battleship game, dubbed sea animals, which lets students practice oral skills. more activities are still in development or in a prototype phase and are not included in the platform yet. as future work we plan to incorporate more nlp in the existing activities, as well as create more activities that can exploit this processing better. for example more games that use plain text (such as stories or articles) as an input, because those are typically the most useful for the teachers working on a particular topic. we will plan our school visits to receive more structured teacher feedback and a more precise analysis of student interaction with the games. in addition, we have outlined a plan to do a three-visit observation of teachers who are proficient speakers of english to see how they manage the tools. we are also planning to provide access as teachers to a group of teachers willing to work closely with the project in order to understand their needs and how they work with the system. current state of the art in many nlp tasks allows us to increase the complexity of some games as a way of improving its mechanics, e.g. the story game could try to solve the chronological graph of events and use this order instead of the narrative one. the booknlp library 13 has interesting features that can enrich the story game in different ways. we also have a generator of qa exercises for reading comprehension which is being integrated in the tool, allowed by recent advances in methods for question generation. we also look for developing more multiplayer games, since those are the most engaging for the students. this vision was also shared by the teachers that answered our survey. in this line, the story game could be extended as a multiplayer game using mechanics inspired in the timeline board game, where two or more players compete putting events in the correct order to win. lastly, we also plan to include a model for automatic correction of texts. this would help teachers to reduce the amount of work required to detect common mistakes of spanish-speaking english students.