Applying digital technology to linguistic education: a connectivism-based intelligent learning system*

Abstract

The advent of a highly interactive and networked digital era of Web 2.0 has greatly changed the way we view knowledge and the learning process. Knowledge is more reflected as an emerging dynamic network, rather than an attainable objective state. The learning process, as a result, is a process of network formation instead of knowledge transferring. With the acknowledgement of these transformations, this study sheds light on how to apply digital technology to linguistic education by matching up the digital learning theory of connectivism with the dynamic and emerging features of linguistics sources. By aggregating large-scale corpus into linguistic learning network, the study observes and evaluates how data extracting, model exploring, verifying and falsifying are interacted in students' linguistic learning process. It is demonstrated that this corpus-assisted digital learning approach, can not only promote students' acquisition in linguistics, but can also enhance students' learning abilities in general, such as problem-solving ability, data-mining ability, and online learning ability.