LEXI: A Semantic Tool to Enrich Lexical Competence of Language Learners

Lexical competence lies at the heart of language learning, it is an essential element for acquiring reading, writing and communication proficiency. Although vocabulary instruction is an essential part in a language classroom, research suggests that learners still lack necessary lexical competence in word knowledge. In this paper we propose an educational software tool, called LEXI, which aims to enhance learners' lexical competence using ontologies. Ontologies provide a model which is capable of representing lexical semantics in a way which explicate meat-linguistic information. Adopting such a model will provide an environment which supports learners in grasping the meaning of words, and thus improving their lexical competence.