abstract
- In this chapter we identify the difficulties that lead students of Language Processing (LP) courses to fail. All of us that teach Language Processing topics are aware of the complexity of this task; we know that a great part of the students will face big difficulties inherent to the level of abstraction associated with some of the basic concepts in the area, and to the technical capacities required to implement efficient processors. A key issue that we have identified along the years we are teaching Language Processing courses is the lack of students’ motivation to learn the main topics. This issue is something that we want to overcome with our proposal. A starting point for this research is to identify the main concepts involved in Language Processing subject, and to understand the skills required to learn them. Considering that a person just learns when is involved in a process we argue that motivation is a crucial factor to engage students in the course work allowing them to achieve the required knowledge acquisition. We will state that motivation is highly dependent on the languages used to work on during the course. So, we discuss the characteristics that a language should have to be a motivating case study. We think that LP teachers should be very careful in their choices and be astute in the way they explore the underlying grammars along the course evolution.