MODEL FOR PEDAGOGICAL INDEXATION OF TEXTS FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING

In this communication we propose to expose the main pedagogical ressource description standards limitations for the description of raw ressources, through the scope of pedagogical indexation of texts for language teaching. To do so we will resort to the testimony of language teachers reagarding their practices. We will then propose a model supposed to exceed these limitations. This model is articulated around the notion of text facet, which we introduce here. 1 CORPORA FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING Thanks to the communicative approach’s widespread use (cf. (Levy, 1997)) authentic text is at the heart of the teachers set of problems. However, corpora, despite numerous, are not dedicated to text search for language teaching. Querying mecanisms mostly rely on traditional keywords queries. Teachers display an ability to adapt computer tools of which they were not meant to be the end user, such as in Tim Johns’ Data Driven Learning (DDL)(Higgins and Johns, 1984). All the same, some of the flaws of CALL systems mentioned in (Antoniadis et al., 2004) accurately describe the situation of language corpora for language teaching: when a teacher seeks to find a text in a corpus , there is no system that allows him/her to express his/her request in terms of his/her set of problems, using pedagogical concepts. 1.1 Pedagogical Indexation for Language Teaching The project to create a pedagogically indexed text base for language teaching directly stems from these considerations. This project will lead to the implementation of a prototype (under development). It should fulfill the following use cases: text query and text addition. Lefevre’s definition of “documentary language”1(Lefevre, 2000) explicitely puts the users at the center of the indexation process. Consequently: Definition (Pedagogical Indexation). Pedagogical indexation is performed following a documentary language, which describes objects according to pedagogical criteria (relevant to didactics). In our project, the considered objects are texts and we want the users (language teachers) to be able to find those objects by formulating questions that are relevant to their set of problems, i.e. language didactics. The scope of this article is that of pedagogical indexation of texts for language teaching.