Grammar Tools support added to Microsoft Edge

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Doitsujin
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Grammar Tools support added to Microsoft Edge

Postby Doitsujin » Wed May 23, 2018 6:54 pm

I've just installed the 2018 spring update for Microsoft Windows 10 and noticed that Microsoft has added Grammar Tools support to Microsoft Edge. One of the features, which might be of interest to language learners, is the optional part-of-speech tagger, which allows users to highlight nouns, verbs and adjectives in different colors.
Unfortunately, it's only available for a limited number of languages and, as you'll see, not 100% reliable.
To give you an idea of its usefulness, I've tested it with the English, Spanish and German epubs.
(Since Microsoft Edge doesn't seem to have a dedicated Open Epub menu item, you'll have to open epubs via Open with > Microsoft Edge.)
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tommus
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Re: Grammar Tools support added to Microsoft Edge

Postby tommus » Thu May 24, 2018 1:09 pm

Doitsujin wrote:To give you an idea of its usefulness, I've tested it with the English, Spanish and German epubs.

Thanks for that tip. It looks neat but I wonder about its usefulness. The colours seem to be quite distracting to normal reading. Most readers, even those at beginner's levels, will probably be able to identify nouns, verbs and adjectives about as easily and accurately as Edge can. Does anyone have specific suggestions as to how this feature can be helpful? I see that Edge can also split words into syllables which would be useful, but it would be far more useful if it also marked the accented syllable, which it apparently does not.
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Cainntear
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Re: Grammar Tools support added to Microsoft Edge

Postby Cainntear » Thu May 24, 2018 3:51 pm

It’s presumably targeted at linguistics students more than anyone else, and linguistics lecturers are probably trying to work out how this is going to affect their homework tasks...
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Doitsujin
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Re: Grammar Tools support added to Microsoft Edge

Postby Doitsujin » Thu May 24, 2018 5:50 pm

tommus wrote:Does anyone have specific suggestions as to how this feature can be helpful?
According to Microsoft:
Microsoft wrote:Learning Tools is designed to support students with dyslexia and dysgraphia in the classroom, but can support anyone who wants to make reading on their device easier.
Some studies suggest that nouns capitalization aids reading comprehension. Maybe highlighting all nouns has the same effect for students with reading comprehension problems.

Unfortunately the most-cited studies in this field are only available in German:

Gfroerer, Stefan/Günther, Hartmut/Bock, Michael: Augenbewegungen und Substantivgroßschreibung
Bock, Michael/Hagenschneider, Klaus/Schweer, Alfred: Zur Funktion der Groß- und Kleinschreibung beim Lesen deutscher, englischer und niederländischer Texte

For an English summary of these studies, see this website.
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