ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the affordances of automated syntactic analysis (ASA) for language teaching. Following an overview of the state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) technologies for ASA, the chapter systematically reviews three key research strands that demonstrate how such NLP capabilities can be implemented into language pedagogy with distinct pedagogical foci. In the first strand, ASA is used to identify, highlight, and create exercises on target syntactic features in pedagogical texts, with the goal to promote learners’ grammar acquisition. The pedagogical integration of ASA in this strand often draws on focus-on-form and input enhancement-based pedagogical activities. In the second strand, the role of ASA is to parse pedagogical texts and present them in modified formats in order to facilitate syntactic processing. This strand of research posits that syntactic enhancement affords learners greater access to syntactic relationships within a text, which, in turn, may promote the development of the learners’ reading skills and potentially other language skills, too. The third strand integrates ASA with rhetorical/functional analysis of texts to promote the development of learners’ ability to recognize genre-specific form-function mappings. The chapter concludes with a discussion of future directions of ASA-informed language pedagogy.
