How to Create SLIM courseware

The book is a collection of excerpts and examples of linguistic materials produced in SLIM project in the academic year 1994-1995. The project has come into life thanks to the initiative of the current Chancellor of the University Ca' Foscari, Prof. Paolo Costa, on the basis of a proposal that I officially presented to the University Board, who approved and financed it. The aim of the project is that of creating and organizing software tools for self-learning of foreign languages, and adapting commercially available audiovideo materials. The peculiarity of these software tools is their interactivity, which in our case is based on the ability of the computer to realize recognition tasks and other similar comparison tasks on the oral production of the student. These tasks are possible nowadays in so far as speech recognition has become a reality available on small PCs. Another important feature is the automatization of exercises and their complete adequacy with the actual learning materials used in the course. To realize this important point, all texts have been manually transcribed and linguistically classified at various levels of complexity: at word level, phrase level, sentence level, utterance level and finally at communicative unit level. These classifications constitute the linguistic backbone of the courseware and ar4e recorded in a database which is always activated while the student is working. They may be phonetic, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, functional, communicative classifications; else they may encode the level of difficulty due to contrastive, phonetic, graphemic distance registered between the two languages L1 and L2.