Inquiry-Based Learning: Cognitive Measures & Systems Support (Home)

Linguistics: CHAT Project

Linguistics courses at Hampshire College have used interactive CD-ROM-based multimedia, developed by the investigators (and being published by MIT Press), but neither this software nor other available linguistics software supports true inquiry-based interactivity.

CHAT:

• is based on variant of the Turing test. Users participate in a chat-room-like environment in which they attempt to build grammars that will allow them to post ever more complex and interesting grammatical sentences in a natural language (English in this case).
• provides lexicon and syntax rule-building tool kits based on the current Chomskyan minimalist framework for syntactic theory.
• embodies a theory of inquiry as theory/model-building.
• motivates average students to master abstract, formal material.
• allows users and instructors to collaborate or compete in various ways; intended for use in class or lab sessions, with 5-20 students and a teacher or TA present.

The first versions of the CHAT software and associated classroom activities are being tested in Spring 1999. Further development will occur in Summer of 1999, with another round of testing in the 1999/2000 school year.

Some preliminary results:

• Local collaboration, between students sharing the same machine, has thus far been more important than networked interaction via the chat room.
• The user-constructed sentence-generator framework appears to be very successful in motivating students to grapple with difficult aspects of syntactic theory.

Screens from CHAT: