Building a Repository of Exercises for Learning Latin

Abstract

This study introduces quality criteria and a reference implementation of an exercise repository for Latin language exercises, with a special focus on vocabulary. The repository is supposed to be easily accessible to people with no prior knowledge of corpus linguistics or natural language processing. Teachers in high schools can generate exercises themselves, which should be fully customizable and adaptive with regard to the learners.

To facilitate the process of creating new exercises from ancient texts, additional linguistic information is needed. For instance, a Keyword-In-Context analysis enables teachers to investigate usage patterns for single words by looking at visualizations of morphological, syntactic and lexical phenomena.

Besides, exercises need to be findable and accessible. To achieve this, a public repository with an underlying PostgreSQL database was created, so exercises can be stored and queried according to their relevant metadata, e.g., vocabulary, textual complexity or interaction type. The repository can be used by teachers to retrieve, modify and try out exercises developed by their fellow pedagogues. In this way, didactic efforts can be shared and built upon not just within the same school, but within the whole country, in many cases even internationally.