Abstract

This paper describes the Spanish ICALL system ESPADA which helps language learners to improve their syntactical knowledge. The most important parts of ESPADA for the learner are a Demonstration Module and an Analysis Module. The Demonstration Module provides animated presentation of selected grammatical information. The Analysis Module is able to parse ill-formed sentences and to give adequate feedback on 28 different error types from different levels of language use (syntax, semantics, agreement). It contains a robust chart-based island parser which uses a combination of mal-rules and constraint relaxation to ensure that learner input can be analysed and appropriate error feedback can be generated.