ABSTRACT

The Athena Language Learning Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) began in 1983 as an attempt to apply the principles of communicative language learning to the multifunctional interactive medium promised by emerging technologies. The three emerging technologies that the project explored were natural language processing (NLP), interactive video, and speech processing. The Athena Language Learning Project set out to model exercises for the emerging workstation medium. The strategy for designing the NLP system was to create a language-independent framework with language-specific modules NLP work remains promising for language learning, especially in the work of analyzing input from a syntactic perspective. NLP systems could provide students with immediate grammar-checking feedback, and more importantly perhaps, they could provide researchers with important information on student errors, which could broaden our knowledge of second language acquisition. It is important to define tasks narrowly to create micro-worlds in which the computer-generated language is credible.