An Effective Way to Teach Language Processing Courses

Abstract

All of us that teach Language Processing topics are aware that a great part of the students face big difficulties and a lack of motivation inherent to the concept abstraction level and to the technical capacities required to implement efficient processors. In order to overcome this problem, a starting point is to identify the main concepts involved in Language Processing subject and to consider that a person learns when he/she is involved in a process. The authors argue that motivation is a crucial factor to engage students in the course work, and it is highly dependent on the languages used to work on during the course. Therefore, they discuss the characteristics that a language should have to be a motivating case study. The authors think that LP teachers should be very careful in their choices and be astute in the way they explore the underlying grammars along the course evolution.