Learning with EuroComDidact ToGo

The app EuroComDidact ToGo does not only train to build up interlingual routines for unmasking ‘unknown’ words in foreign languages. It also supports to identify morphological correspondancy rules between bridge and target languages.

The following figure shows how the EuroComDidact ToGo app exercises look like. On the right side, the example presents a form-congruent series (Erklärung, explication, explicación...), on the left side, we see a partly opaque series (charmant, affascinante, encantador…)

The choice of the target language “Italian” requires the insertion of spiegazione. The partly opaque words’ series appears entirely. Here, learners will focus attention on the Italian word, because it is a word of the target language chosen.

The following explanations elucidate the educational potential of the exercise pattern in terms of interlingual morphological and orthographic correspondences. Mentioning the learning goals provides information about exercise patterns and tasks.

Learning goals concerning Italian

  1. Knowing that in Italian the international prefix ex-/es– is frequently replaced by s+consonant: spiegazione, lo studente, lo spirito ≠ esprimere, espresso (en./fr. explication, sp. estudiante, en. express).
  2. Knowing that the suffixes en./fr. –tion-it.-zione-pt. –cão-sp. –ción-ge. ‑tion– are equivalent and generate the feminization of words.
  3.  Deepening and widening lexical knowledge of the lexematic root -plicat‑: duplicat-… sp. duplicado, ge. duplizieren…
  4. Realizing that in Italian, double consonants are of high frequency.
  5. Controlling whether a-ffascinante is in relationship with ad-fascinante?
  6. Getting aware that one’s own prior knowledge as far as it is relevant to language learning is important for acquiring plurilingualism.
  7. Knowing that between interlingually transparent words semantic adequacy is not always given.
  8. Knowing that interlingually opaque words reduce intercomprehensibilty. (The number of the fully opaque series is limited. In the Core Vocabulary of Romance Plurilingualism it amounts to about 850 out of 9550 series. The sooner opaque words are acquired, the more transparent foreign language texts will be.)
  9. Knowing that new insights into foreign language learning must be integrated into one’s own individual Road Map of Learning.

Learning goals about acquiring multilingual reading skills

        The learning objectives listed for Italian as a target language also apply to the promotion of plurilingual reading skills.

  1. Learning languages through the intercomprehension approach means creating associations between the languages involved and their learning.
  2. Getting sensitive to false friends and knowing how to identify them. Starting with form-congruent series: en. charming, fr. charmant, ge. charmant, sp. encandador, it. affascinante:
    a. Does the series have a common semantic nucleus? Where are differences? Language for language.
    b. What is the difference between the words (form equivalencies) in terms of forms and contents?
    c. What about use?
  3. What strategy to avoid errors in writing and speaking? (Exclusively for those who want to acquire productive skills.)
  4. What is the difference between en. explanation and explication? (for native speakers of English: … between fr. crisser and grincer).

Tools

To develop your answers, make use of concordancers, for example :
https://www.corpusdoportugues.org/
https://www.corpusdelespanol.org/
To get further information:
https://wikis.fu-berlin.de/display/tdr/Spanische+Korpora+und+Textdatenbanken
Davies, Mark. (2008-) The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): One billion million words, 1990-2019. Available online at https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/.  


 

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