Supporting instruction of formulaic sequences using videos at scale

Abstract

To help language learners achieve fluency, instructors often focus on teaching formulaic sequences (FS)—phrases such as idioms or phrasal verbs that are processed, stored, and retrieved holistically. Teaching FS effectively is challenging as it heavily involves instructors’ intuition, prior knowledge, and manual efforts to identify a set of FSs with high utility. In this paper, we present FSIST, a tool that supports instructors for video-based instruction of FS. The core idea of FSIST is to utilize videos at scale to build a list of FSs along with videos that include example usages. To evaluate how FSIST can effectively support instructors, we conducted a user study with three English instructors. Results show that the browsing interactions provided in FSIST support instructors to efficiently find parts of videos that show example usages of FSs.