Gap-fill Tests for Language Learners: Corpus-Driven Item Generation
Simon Smith, P. V. S. Avinesh, Adam Kilgarriff · Coventry University Open Collections (Coventry university) · 2010
Gap-fill exercises have an important role in language teaching. They allow students to demonstrate that they understand vocabulary in context, discouraging memorisation of translations. It is time consuming and difficult for item writers to create good test items, and even then test items are open to Sinclair’s critique of invented examples. We present a system,TEDDCLOG, which automatically generates draft test items from a corpus. TEDDCLOG takes the key (the word which will form the correct answer to the exercise) as input. It finds distractors (the alternative, wrong answers for the multiplechoice question) from a distributional thesaurus, and identifies a collocate of the key that does not occur with the distractors. Next it finds a simple corpus sentence containing the key and collocate. The system then presents the sentences and distractors to the user for approval, modification or rejection. The system is implemented using the API to the Sketch Engine, a leading corpus query system. We compare TEDDCLOG with other gap-fill-generation systems, and offer a partial evaluation of the results. Key Words: gap-fill, Sketch Engine, corpus linguistics, ELT, GDEX, proficiency testing