Student modelling for the ELE-TUTOR Its: designing an adaptive component to support linguistic competence in Spanish as a foreign language

Authors

  • Fernanda Barrientos Contreras Universidad de Concepción
  • Anita Ferreira Cabrera Universidad de Concepción
  • Pedro Salcedo Lagos Universidad de Concepción

Abstract

Intelligent Tutorial Systems (ITS) for language teaching arecomputational applications that are capable to process naturallanguage input provided by a language student, in order to givefeedback strategies according to their linguistic competence.However, in order to achieve this adaptability, it is important todevelop a student module, which stores and processes informationabout each one of the students that interact with the system. Thepresent work is a design of a student module for an intelligent tutorialsystem (ITS) to teach Spanish as a foreign language consideringthe B2 level of the Common European Framework which takes asvariables the student's level of proficiency, their learning style andthe type of language error made by them during the interaction withthe ITS. Due to the fact that the proficiency level variable changes asthe student works on the exercises, the student module also containsa diagnosis and update system for the data that uses a Bayesian beliefnetwork. The output of the student module is a vector with specificvalues for each variable, which is delivered to a tutor module thatwill decide which feedback strategies should be used.

Keywords:

ITS, student modeling, Spanish as FL, learning style, Bayesian belief network