Inflection Points: Designing Language Tools for Practitioners

The Inflection Points project brings our knowledge about linguistic forms into language teaching and assessing language acquisition. Partnering with language professionals - L1 and L2 teachers and speech pathologists - who teach and assess using these forms in real life, it reassesses, repurposes and redesigns tools designed for academic use, co-creating resources with practitioners to meet the growing and evolving needs they are encountering. In doing so, it also benefits the end users: children and others who learn and use language professionally. Inflection Points originates in our AHRC-funded research on forms of words and in tools produced and used during this grant to study them. It focuses on Czech and Croatian, two languages with complex inflectional morphology (the different forms words take in performing different functions: e.g. speak, speaks, spoke, spoken). In these languages, nouns have 10-12 different forms and verbs more than twice as many. Consequently, speakers' mastery of correct usage of these forms in context is critical to assessing fluency. Teaching these forms to children, non-native speakers or heritage speakers, or assessing children's developing fluency, has a profound equality dimension. Both languages have long traditions of language culture focused on forms found in authoritative sources. Language has been taught - to native speakers and non-native learners - through presentation and assimilation of these forms, and has traditionally been assessed by adherence to or deviation from the forms learned. But both Croatia and Czechia have undergone profound changes in the last two decades. Language teaching has begun to adopt more research-based methods, especially at lower levels. Aware that specific language impairment and general voice and speech difficulties affect respectively 7% and 10% of children under 10, practitioners are moving to modern methods of assessment. Czechia has seen a massive influx of Ukrainian refugees since 2022, nearly 370,000 (over 3% of the population, Europe's highest proportion, including nearly 50,000 children in Czech schools). Croatia experienced outmigration to Germany of c. 350,000 after 2012, and reintegrating returning children of emigres in schools is a linguistic teaching issue. Our project speaks to these challenges and works with those facing them to create suitable resources. The project engages associations of primary and secondary school teachers of Czech and Croatian, teachers of non-native Czech learners and heritage speakers of Croatian, speech pathologists and other language assessment professionals. Stemming from research produced in the AHRC-funded Feast and Famine project (AH/T002859/1), we start with three tools developed in this project (MultiDis, an app for child language assessment; DvojBa, a database of competing forms in Croatian; and GramatiKat, a corpus-based visualiser of grammatical profiles in Czech) and one pre-existing resource (the Internet Language Reference Book for Czech). With colleagues from professional associations, we will redesign, revisualise and repurpose these apps for their membership, providing more accurate tracking of child language development; better targeting of L1, L2 and heritage-language teaching resources; and we conduct a survey of users of the Czech online grammar to provide more relevant information for publicly-accessible language handbooks.