Innovation in Language Learning

In our insight, we often experience a case like as interpreting a given situation (reading a news article, etc.) into a few concise expressions and share empathy with others. The term “concise expression” stands for a phrase/sentence which is rather simple yet enough comprehensive to achieve intuition about target affairs. Its instance is idiom / proverb / quote / poetic phrase / etc. that arouse rich associative images for native speakers and enables people effective communications. Those concise expressions would include deeper sense than surface meaning.

In order to understand such implication, second language learners should be accustomed with core sense or nuance from actual usages of target expressions in appropriate contexts, though it is hard to study a lot of examples in a short time. Thus, it is desirable to provide suggestive information to learners so as to grasp the correct or central meaning of various concise expressions. Considering the above background, we propose a new method of teaching/ learning “concise expressions” as follows.

For the purpose of preparing useful information for learners, we collected surrounding text of each concise expression, e.g. text where the pertinent expression is quoted with co-occurrent keywords which often correspond to related affective features. Based on using large-scale text corpus, we can estimate the relative affinities with those features. For instance, relationships between a certain concise expression and respective basic emotions (happy, sad, angry, scared, tender and excited) or other features can be visualized as their percentages. In our preliminary investigation, such distribution of affective features for given concise expression correlates with human subjective intuition, which yield individual differences.

Even if the lexical meaning of a concise expression is presented with a sample sentence, it would be still insufficient to achieve the language proficiency of the second language. Besides, one example with context might show only one of variations in subjective impressions. Accordingly, the above-mentioned indication of affective features distribution would be helpful for second language learners to acquire the nuance or significance of the target concise expression when it will be actually used. In other words, one can learn with the least examples (with context), in support of the proposed technique.

At the present stage, we are aiming at examination of our hypothesis-based idea for applying certain learning scene of English as the second language, in cooperation with experts in language education. We will also discuss related issues referring existing studies, with concluding remarks toward future directions.