Developing didactic principles for annotation based learning

Learners often conceive grammar as an irrelevant and even boring subject. As a result they significantly lack the key competence to describe and analyze grammatical structures (Nänny 2014: 183; Habermann 2013:35).

When conveying grammatical knowledge, corpus based methods such as manual annotation by the learners still provides a new approach to access grammatical categories. The main purpose of annotation is the assignment of features and attributes to individual segments of an utterance. Acquiring knowledge about grammar is a very similar process. Therefore annotation tasks provide an appropriate means for reifying and visualizing grammatical entities and concepts. However the required didactics for this purpose are still to be defined.

Our poster aims at contributing a model (Annotation Abstraction Model; AAM) for the different abstraction levels of the annotation process of grammatical items. Our AAM combines a triad consisting of the three entities learner, teacher and theory which are linked by the annotation as a guiding principle. Teaching grammar is used as an example to demonstrate opportunities for the didactization of corpus linguistics. Learners access more sophisticated concepts and entities of grammar such as morphological primitives with increasing qualification. Our model visualizes a corresponding relation between the linguistic level of abstraction (grammatical models; theoretical framework) and the technical means (paper based annotation; computer tool). Therefore we present concrete methods for adapting the technical level used in the annotation exercises to the level of abstraction reached by the learner.

The reduction with regard to technical means and contents allows for the inductive development of language awareness “Sprachbewusstheit” (cf. Bredel 2013), thus enabling the learner to discover language as describable subject matter rather than simply as a means of communication. Moreover the model contributes to a better comprehension of didactic necessities when working with corpora in the context of teaching.