Visualization of educational data in a German-language corpus of student texts

Abstract

Introduction. Digital transformation of education involves the use of digital tools in managing the educational process as a whole and in the learning process in individual disciplines. The specifics of teaching a foreign language require special functionality from digital tools. The purpose of the article is to explore the possibilities of a corpus of student texts in a foreign language for analyzing the results of students’ educational work and forming an adapted learning path within the discipline related to the study of a foreign language. Materials and methods. The material for the study was the Petrozavodsk Annotated Corpus of Texts (PACT), containing written works in German and French written by students from 2019 to 2023. Texts are accompanied by attributive information about the author, writing conditions, evaluation and error corrections. A web application has been developed to work with the corpus. The application includes personal accounts for teachers and students. To analyze the state of the learning process and make subsequent decisions on managing the learning process, the web application contains several tools for visualizing error statistics at different levels of detail with the ability to select texts according to different conditions. Results of the study. As part of the study, patterns were identified that connect the types of errors with the genres of texts, with the severity of the errors, and with the emotional and physiological state of the student. Russian-speaking students studying German as a foreign language make the most mistakes in the choice of lexemes, spelling, punctuation and the place of the verb in a sentence. At the same time, genre differences can be observed to distribute the number of errors by their type. There is an increase in the relative number of gross errors by 1.5 times for senior students compared to the first year. Errors in the choice of lexeme are critical for understanding the content of the text. The severity of the error does not depend on the genre of the text. Conclusion. The results of the study can be used to build corpora of student texts with educational analytics functions in dashboard format. The results obtained can be useful in developing teaching materials for the “Foreign Language” discipline.