A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Verbal and Non-verbal Immediacy <s> Previous research has indicated that nonverbal teacher behaviors such as smiling, vocal expressiveness, movement about the classroom, and relaxed body position are salient low‐inference variables of a process which results in a product of increased cognitive and affective learning. This study identified a set of verbal teacher immediacy behaviors which similarly relate to increased student learning. Results indicated differentiated use of various types of verbal immediacy messages between small and larger classes, and that the impact of teacher immediacy behaviors (both verbal and nonverbal) on learning is coincidentally enhanced as class size increases. The study provides empirical definition of a specific set of low‐inference verbal variables which, in combination with previously identified nonverbal variables, clarify a single process‐product model for effective instructional interaction. <s> BIB001 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Verbal and Non-verbal Immediacy <s> Robots increasingly have the potential to interact with people in daily life. It is believed that, based on this ability, they will play an essential role in human society in the not-so-distant future. This article examined the proposition that robots could form relationships with children and that children might learn from robots as they learn from other children. In this article, this idea is studied in an 18-day field trial held at a Japanese elementary school. Two English-speaking "Robovie" robots interacted with first- and sixth-grade pupils at the perimeter of their respective classrooms. Using wireless identification tags and sensors, these robots identified and interacted with children who came near them. The robots gestured and spoke English with the children, using a vocabulary of about 300 sentences for speaking and 50 words for recognition. The children were given a brief picture-word matching English test at the start of the trial, after 1 week and after 2 weeks. Interactions were counted using the tags, and video and audio were recorded. In the majority of cases, a child's friends were present during the interactions. Interaction with the robot was frequent in the 1st week, and then it fell off sharply by the 2nd week. Nonetheless, some children continued to interact with the robot. Interaction time during the 2nd week predicted improvements in English skill at the posttest, controlling for pretest scores. Further analyses indicate that the robots may have been more successful in establishing common ground and influence when the children already had some initial proficiency or interest in English. These results suggest that interactive robots should be designed to have something in common with their users, providing a social as well as technical challenge. <s> BIB002 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Verbal and Non-verbal Immediacy <s> This meta‐analysis reviews the findings of 81 studies (N=24,474) examining the relationship between teachers' verbal or nonverbal immediacy (or both) and students' learning outcomes. The cumulative evidence indicates meaningful correlations between teachers' nonverbal immediacy and student reports of perceived learning (r=.51) and affective learning (r=.49), but only a slight correlation with students' performance on cognitive learning measures (r=.17). Teachers' verbal immediacy was found to correlate with students' perceived learning (r=.49) and affective learning (r=.49), but again the relationship with performed cognitive learning was notably smaller (r=.06). Average effect sizes were generally smaller in experimental research designs than in survey‐type research, and generally larger when verbal/nonverbal immediacy was measured as a single construct. The cumulative results of this meta‐analysis confirm that teacher immediacy has a substantial relationship with certain attitudes and perceptions of stu... <s> BIB003 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Verbal and Non-verbal Immediacy <s> Teaching is inherently a social interaction between teacher and student. Despite this knowledge, many educational tools, such as vocabulary training programs, still model the interaction in a tutoring scenario as unidirectional knowledge transfer rather than a social dialog. Therefore, ongoing research aims to develop virtual agents as more appropriate media in education. Virtual agents can induce the perception of a life-like social interaction partner that communicates through natural modalities such as speech, gestures and emotional expressions. This effect can be additionally enhanced with a physical robotic embodiment. This paper presents the development of social supportive behaviors for a robotic tutor to be used in a language learning application. The effect of these behaviors on the learning performance of students was evaluated. The results support that employing social supportive behavior increases learning efficiency of students. <s> BIB004 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Verbal and Non-verbal Immediacy <s> This study introduces the educational assistant robots that we developed for foreign language learning and explores the effectiveness of robot-assisted language learning (RALL) which is in its early stages. To achieve this purpose, a course was designed in which students have meaningful interactions with intelligent robots in an immersive environment. A total of 24 elementary students, ranging in age from ten to twelve, were enrolled in English lessons. A pre-test/post-test design was used to investigate the cognitive effects of the RALL approach on the students??? oral skills. No significant difference in the listening skill was found, but the speaking skills improved with a large effect size at the significance level of 0.01. Descriptive statistics and the pre-test/post-test design were used to investigate the affective effects of RALL approach. The result showed that RALL promoted and improved students??? satisfaction, interest, confidence, and motivation at the significance level of 0.01. <s> BIB005 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Verbal and Non-verbal Immediacy <s> Nonverbal immediacy has been positively correlated with cognitive learning gains in human-human interaction, but remains relatively under-explored in human-robot interaction contexts. This paper presents a study in which robot behaviour is derived from the principles of nonverbal immediacy. Both high and low immediacy behaviours are evaluated in a tutoring interaction with children where a robot teaches how to work out whether numbers are prime. It is found that children who interact with the robot exhibiting more immediate nonverbal behaviour make significant learning gains, whereas those interacting with the less immediate robot do not. A strong trend is found suggesting that the children can perceive the differences between conditions, supporting results from existing work with adults. <s> BIB006 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Verbal and Non-verbal Immediacy <s> An increasing amount of research is being conducted to determine how a robot tutor should behave socially in educational interactions with children. Both human-human and human-robot interaction literature predicts an increase in learning with increased social availability of a tutor, where social availability has verbal and nonverbal components. Prior work has shown that greater availability in the nonverbal behaviour of a robot tutor has a positive impact on child learning. This paper presents a study with 67 children to explore how social aspects of a tutor robot's speech influences their perception of the robot and their language learning in an interaction. Children perceive the difference in social behaviour between `low' and `high' verbal availability conditions, and improve significantly between a pre- and a post-test in both conditions. A longer-term retention test taken the following week showed that the children had retained almost all of the information they had learnt. However, learning was not affected by which of the robot behaviours they had been exposed to. It is suggested that in this short-term interaction context, additional effort in developing social aspects of a robot's verbal behaviour may not return the desired positive impact on learning gains. <s> BIB007
Non-verbal immediacy is defined as creating a feeling of connectedness with others by smiling, gesturing, leaning in, engaging in eye contact, using a pleasant vocal tone, reducing physical distance, and the like. Verbal immediacy, however, is defined as using language in an attempt to create a feeling of closeness. One way to achieve this is by using students' names during the interaction BIB002 BIB005 . Saerbeck et al. showed that a robot creating verbal immediacy, by using "we" instead of "you," using motivational phrases, and relating to students-along with presenting non-verbal immediacy behaviors-led to increased language learning and motivation among students BIB004 . However, it is difficult to conclude to which behaviors (verbal or non-verbal) this is attributable. In fact, when studied independently, verbal immediacy has been shown to have no effect on robot-assisted learning BIB007 . It should be noted that in this study the robot interacted with students one-on-one, and results of previous research show that verbal immediacy becomes more important with increasing class size BIB001 . Nonverbal immediacy, however, has previously been shown to increase learning BIB006 . As well, a meta-analysis on the effects of immediacy in human teaching found that non-verbal immediacy is more strongly associated with learning than verbal immediacy, which is very weakly positively correlated with learning, though both are meaningfully correlated with perceived learning and motivation BIB003 . Therefore, designing robots that display verbal immediacy, as well as non-verbal immediacy, is likely still important when considering long-term interaction.