Developing A Web-based Workbook for English Supporting the Interaction of Students and Teachers

We discuss the development of FeedBook, an intelligent electronic workbook supporting the teaching of English as Foreign Language in German secondary school. The overarching goal is to address real-life formal education needs using current Natural Language Processing technology. Our interactive, web-based workbook is based on the print workbook of a schoolbook officially approved for 7th grade English classes in secondary schools in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The workbook offers a range of activities for students that typically are assigned by instructors as homework to accompany the regular English classes. In our web-based version, students can complete activities online, submit them to their teacher, and view teacher feedback. Teachers are supported in providing both formative and summative feedback to individual students by an auto-correct and feedback memory system, and they can view aggregates of student performance. This article describes the development of the web-based workbook and its use from a technical and pedagogical perspective. We are currently working on adding automatic immediate feedback to learners that is designed to incrementally support individual learners in successfully completing a given task.