Hayat Alrefaie and Allan Ramsay, The University of Manchester, United Kingdom

Language learners are faced with a myriad of tasks: they have to learn how to make the sounds of the language they are learning, they have to learn its grammatical patterns, and they have to learn its vocabulary. There are numerous computational tools to help with the first two of these tasks. Providing help with the third raises a number of new challenges. The current paper describes a tool which will help learner to understand how to use ‘closed-class’ lexical items: this is a particularly taxing problem. To learn that the Arabic for ‘office’ is
 (mktb) is fairly straightforward: keep saying to yourself ‘office’=
 (mktb) over and over again until it sticks. But learning the Arabic equivalent of ‘on’ is more difficult. The paper outlines a mechanism for providing diagnostic information about particular examples, with the aim of helping the learner to understand why a particular translation of a given closed-class item is appropriate in one situation but not in another.

CALL tool, Diagnostic, Meaning postulates, logical form & Arabic Preposition.