A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Instructional Methods <s> This paper presents a framework for the systematic description and comparison of methods. The proliferation of new methods in recent years suggests the need for such a model. A method is defined in terms of three levels: approach, design, and procedure. Approach is a theory of language and of language learning. Design is a definition of linguistic content, a specification for the selection and organization of content, and a description of the role of teacher, learner, and teaching materials. Procedure is concerned with techniques and practices in a method. The model is discussed with reference to recent proposals in methodology, and the application of the model is demonstrated. A comparison of the state of the art in language teaching today with the field as it was some twenty years ago reveals some interesting differances. In the fifties and sixties language teaching represented a reasonably unified body of theory and practice. It was clearly linked in its theoretical foundations to linguistics and psychology, particularly as these disciplines were represented in North America. The methodology of language teaching was identified with the orthodoxy of audiolingualism. Language teachers in the eighties, however, have a considerable array of theories and methods to choose from. Contemporary language teaching draws on a number of areas which were unknown or unconsulted by the linguists and psychologists of the fifties and sixties. These include (following Candlin 1976) studies in textual cohesion, language functions, speech act theory, sociolinguistic variation, presuppositional semantics, interaction analysis, ethnomethodology and face to face analysis, ethnography of speaking, process analysis, and discourse analysis. Methodologies unheard of in the sixties are now familiar, at least by name: Silent Way, Total Physical Response, Communicative Language Teaching, Counseling Learning, Suggestopedia. The practitioner is thus confronted with a somewhat bewildering set of options at the levels of both theory and practice. One conclusion might be that the field of language teaching has moved away from a generally <s> BIB001 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Instructional Methods <s> This paper looks briefly at the beginnings of what has come to be known as communicative language teaching (CLT), then discusses current issues and promising avenues of inquiry. The perspective is international. CLT is seen to be not a British, European, or U.S. phenomenon, but rather an international effort to respond to the needs of present-day language learners in many different contexts of learning. Not long ago, when American structuralist linguistics and behaviorist psychology were the prevailing influences in language teaching methods and materials, second/foreign language teachers talked about communication in terms of language skills, seen to be four: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. These skill categories were widely accepted and provided a ready-made framework for methods manuals, learner course materials, and teacher education programs. They were collectively described as active skills, speaking and writing, and passive skills, reading and listening. Today, listeners and readers are no longer regarded as passive. They are seen as active participants in the negotiation of meaning. Schemata, expectancies, and top-down/bottom-up processing are among the terms now used to capture the necessarily complex, interactive nature of this negotiation. Yet full and widespread understanding of communication as negotiation has been hindered by the terms that came to replace the earlier active/passive dichotomy. The skills needed to engage in speaking and writing activities were described subsequently as productive, whereas listening and reading skills were said to be receptive. While certainly an improvement over the earlier active/passive representation, the terms productive and receptive fall short of capturing the interactive nature of communication. Lost in this productive/receptive, message sending/message receiving representation is the collaborative nature of meaning making. Meaning <s> BIB002 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Instructional Methods <s> Telling and listening to stories is an ancient tradition that can benefit foreign language learners of all ages, languages, and levels of proficiency. Stories contain linguistic, paralinguistic, discourse, and cultural features that provide the comprehensible input and output that students need to develop their conversational skills. Instructors and students can select and tell stories that they enjoy and that interest their listeners. Some interactive story telling activities are presented, categorized as: Change the Story, Group Picture Story, Jigsaw Story, My Story, Oral Reading, Picture Stories, Psycho Story, Rumor, Shuffled Comics, Story Hour, Strip Story, and Tell Us a Story. Contains 33 references. (Author/LB) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. *********************************************************************** STORYTELLING FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNERS James M. Hendrickson ioreign Language Consultant Lexington, Kentucky <s> BIB003 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Instructional Methods <s> Adhering to the philosophy of constructivism, storytelling is explored as a vehicle for expanding children's existing oral language and developing their literacy abilities during community-sponsored summertime programs. Ongoing observations of the program participants prompted the authors to make the following conclusions: (1) Storytelling is a rich interactive process that facilitates imagination, creative thinking, language abilities, and cooperative learning; (2) Learners actively construct their own understanding, building upon their current knowledge base; (3) Working with others (social interaction) on meaningful tasks enhances learning; and (4) Storytelling offers a limitless opportunity for developing a more authentic awareness of and respect for children with diverse language and cultural backgrounds. <s> BIB004 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Instructional Methods <s> Abstract Literacy learning — learning how to read and write — begins long before children enter school. One of the key skills to reading and writing is the ability to represent thoughts symbolically and share them in language with an audience who may not necessarily share the same temporal and spatial context. Children learn and practice these important language skills everyday, telling stories with the peers and adults around them. In particular, storytelling in the context of peer collaboration provides a key environment for children to learn language skills important for literacy. In light of this, an embodied conversational agent, Sam, who tells stories collaboratively with children was designed. Sam looks like a peer for pre-school children, but tells stories in a developmentally advanced way, modelling narrative skills important for literacy. Results demonstrated that children who played with the virtual peer told stories that more closely resembled the virtual peer's linguistically advanced stories: using more quoted speech and temporal and spatial expressions. In addition, children listened to Sam's stories carefully, assisting her and suggesting improvements. The potential benefits of having technology play a social role in young children's literacy learning is discussed. <s> BIB005 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Instructional Methods <s> In this paper we present our work in the design of playing with robots to learn language in a classroom. We outline our approach of design for emergence: to provide just enough of a game context and challenge for people to be creative, to extend and enrich the experience of play through their interaction in the real world. Robots were designed to put on our mixed reality game stage, a wireless location-based multiplayer game. This paper describes the design and implementation of the task-based role playing game with robots. <s> BIB006 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Instructional Methods <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> BIB007 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Instructional Methods <s> This paper presents the effect of robotics assisted language learning (RALL) on the vocabulary learning and retention of Iranian English as foreign language (EFL) junior high school students in Tehran, Iran. After taking a vocabulary pre-test, 46 beginner level female students at the age of 12, studying in their first year of junior-high participated in two groups of RALL (30 students) and non-RALL (16 students) in this study. The textbook used was the English book (Prospect-1) devised by the Iranian Ministry of Education for 7th graders, and the vocabulary taught and tested (pre-test and post-test) were taken from this book. Moreover, the treatment given by a teacher accompanied by a humanoid robot assistant in the RALL group took about five weeks in which half of the book was covered, and the non-RALL group was taught in a traditional method. Finally, the teacher administered the post-test and delayed post-test whose results of repeated measures ANOVA and Two Ways ANOVA indicated that there was a significant difference regarding participants' vocabulary gain and retention in RALL group comparing to non-RALL group. In addition, the teacher reported the students' positive reaction to RALL in learning vocabulary. Overall, the results revealed that RALL has been very influential in creating an efficient and pleasurable English learning environment. This study has some implications for technology-based education, language teaching, and social robotics fields. <s> BIB008 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Instructional Methods <s> A robot-based English curriculum called The Missing Code has been developed to teach English vocabulary to young children whose home language is one other than English. Guided by theories in children’s learning and motivation, the curriculum was designed to be developmentally appropriate and engaging for children who were 3-5 years old, carefully balancing the familiar and the new. The development process was characterized by iterative cycles of initial design, user testing, and refinement. Through multiple observations of child-robot play in situ, it was noted that children easily learned how to interact with the robot and showed sustained interest and engagement in the curricular activities with the robot. 뀀ഀȠ 뀀ഀȠ <s> BIB009 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Instructional Methods <s> Children's oral language skills in preschool can predict their academic success later in life. As such, increasing children's skills early on could improve their success in middle and high school. To this end, we propose that a robotic learning companion could supplement children's early language education. The robot targets both the social nature of language learning and the adaptation necessary to help individual children. The robot is designed as a social character that interacts with children as a peer, not as a tutor or teacher. It will play a storytelling game, during which it will introduce new vocabulary words, and model good story narration skills, such as including a beginning, middle, and end; varying sentence structure; and keeping cohesion across the story. We will evaluate whether adapting the robot's level of language to the child's - so that, as children improve their storytelling skills, so does the robot - influences (i) whether children learn new words from the robot, (ii) the complexity and style of stories children tell, (iii) the similarity of children's stories to the robot's stories. We expect children will learn more from a robot that adapts to maintain an equal or greater ability than the children, and that they will copy its stories and narration style more than they would with a robot that does not adapt (a robot of lesser ability). However, we also expect that playing with a robot of lesser ability could prompt teaching or mentoring behavior from children, which could also be beneficial to language learning. <s> BIB010 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Instructional Methods <s> This paper reviews peer-reviewed empirical studies on gamification. We create a framework for examining the effects of gamification by drawing from the definitions of gamification and the discussion on motivational affordances. The literature review covers results, independent variables (examined motivational affordances), dependent variables (examined psychological/behavioral outcomes from gamification), the contexts of gamification, and types of studies performed on the gamified systems. The paper examines the state of current research on the topic and points out gaps in existing literature. The review indicates that gamification provides positive effects, however, the effects are greatly dependent on the context in which the gamification is being implemented, as well as on the users using it. The findings of the review provide insight for further studies as well as for the design of gamified systems. <s> BIB011 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Instructional Methods <s> This paper presents a design for a cutting-edge English program in which elementary school learners of English as a foreign language in Taiwan had lively interactions with a teaching assistant robot. Three dimensions involved in the design included (1) a pleasant and interactive classroom environment as the learning context, (2) a teaching assistant robot designed and built by the researchers as instructional technology (instructional tool/medium), and (3) the need for improved motivation and learning outcomes and positive learning experiences of the students as the core research problem. This Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) led to better pedagogical effects on learning and teaching by (1) employing a vivid, enjoyable teaching approach; (2) adopting practical, interesting learning materials; and (3) creating a natural, enjoyable learning context. Both quantitative and qualitative findings of this study indicate that the students' English learning experiences were enhanced, as were their motivation and learn... <s> BIB012 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Instructional Methods <s> Introduction Anthropomorphized robots are found beneficial when they are implemented in education due to their advantages of executing verbal and nonverbal communication with teachers or students in classrooms (Johnson, 2003). For example, some research studies have used autonomous humanoid robots in English classrooms to play the role of native speakers that are able to carry on conversations with pupils in natural language (Lee et al., 2011; Hyun et al., 2008; Movellan et al., 2009; Park et al., 2011). Research studies have confirmed that this type of interaction between robots and humans not only improves teaching effectiveness but also learning motivation because students are less anxious and more cheerful (Papert, 1993). Therefore, more and more applications of robotic technology are now trying to develop activities that can be helpful for teaching and learning English as a foreign language (EFL). This current trend of using robotics to assist language instruction is now known as Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) (Han, 2012). Despite the great benefits of using robots in language teaching and learning, the current application may be limited because of the two major reasons. First, autonomous robots have complex artificial intelligence and are so expensive that normally schools cannot afford them. Moreover, the interaction scenarios between pupils and robots must be pre-programmed by robotics developers, so educators who are not robotics professionals may find it difficult to design or alter the interaction scenarios. Therefore, an alternative to solving the above problems is to buy robots with simple autonomous functions and remote controlled body movements from the supermarkets, or toyshops. These robots are mostly developed in a small size and at a low-cost. Meanwhile, they could be simply controlled by instructors to perform pedagogical missions and teaching materials in the classroom activities. This type of robots is often used as an instructional tool for facilitating learners' engagement and oral interaction. Research has found that interacting with a tangible robot increased more engagement than with a video (Xie, Antle, & Motamedi, 2008). For instance, ROBOSAPIEN, a low-cost remote controlled robot that can be purchased from a toyshop, has been used to be an instructional tool for EFL class at an elementary school (Chang et al., 2010a; Chang et al., 2010b; You et al., 2006). Although there was a breakthrough in terms of reducing the cost of using robots in language teaching and learning, those commercial robots were still not well developed into education because normally instructors had to take much time and effort to interlink robots with instructional materials and classroom activities. In order to expand robot-assisted language teaching, Han (2012) suggested that the system frameworks of RALL combine robot hardware, robot applications and visual instructional contents and help instructors easily design their robot-assisted instruction. Furthermore, the design of the system frameworks should take the language learning goals into account. In our previous research studies, a RALL system framework has been implemented. The developed framework provides an authoring tool for instructors to script teaching materials that can easily add external multimedia resources as well as to script presentations of anthropomorphized robots. Moreover, a material display system can also be found in the framework. Therefore, the present study is, first, to provide a practical study of creating an EFL course using the framework to design robot-assisted instructional materials. Then, it shows the empirical evidence of the designed instructional materials based on students' learning outcomes. Finally, it presents the impact of students' learning motivation because motivation is a critical element to sustain students' attention and engagement in the learning process. In our current study, two groups of the fifth-grade elementary students were targeted to make the comparison. … <s> BIB013 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Instructional Methods <s> This paper presents a study that aims to address the challenges of creating effective educational robots. To this end, we developed a social educational robot which acts as a peer that is also a learner of a foreign language rather than a tutor teaching it. Children engage in a game with a peer robot which is programmed to either always win or always lose. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether children would learn more if they were winning or losing the game to the robot. The study was conducted with 76 children aged 6–10 years old. The conducted study compares children's responses and children's improvements of English vocabulary after a game with the robot. Results indicate that children improve their English significantly more when playing with the losing robot. In addition, girls rated playing with the robot significantly higher than boys did regardless of the robot's playing strategy. <s> BIB014
There are too many language learning methods to recount, but several popular strategies have been employed in the aforementioned studies. One popular approach in RALL is to use total physical response (TPR) (e.g., References  BIB013 ). TPR was created by James Asher in the 1960s and requires movement in response to language. Students learn by physically manifesting commands from the instructor, or sometimes from observing the instructor's response to commands given. The direct method (a.k.a. natural method) focuses on the development of conversational ability  . Similar to how we learn our natural language, this method can be employed in foreign or second language learning. Only the target language is heard-there are no translations from or to one's native language and no explicit grammar rules are taught. Communicative language teaching (CLT) also focuses on conversational ability-social interaction is both the goal and the means by which the goal is achieved BIB002 . Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is based on CLT, but concentrates on having learners complete explicit tasks  . Both CLT and TBLT are quite popular in RALL, especially in research coming from Asia (e.g., References BIB006 BIB007 BIB012 ). They were established in response to an older technique, which is still used, called the audiolingual method (ALM). ALM aims to foster communicative ability through repetition and memorization, focusing on drills that convey correct grammar BIB001 . All these methods are quite different than the grammar-translation method, where the emphasis is on learning grammatical rules and memorizing vocabulary, and speaking is deemphasized completely. As well-although not language teaching methods per se-storytelling and game play are commonly employed in RALL (e.g., References BIB008 BIB014 BIB009 BIB010 ). There is good reason for this. Storytelling, especially collaborative storytelling, is a particularly good interaction scenario as it serves as comprehensible input and promotes comprehensible output BIB003 . It is one of the first ways children engage fully with language, coming before they learn to read or write, and can benefit language learners of any age or skill level BIB004 BIB005 . Additionally, gamification has been used in many fields including education and has been shown to increase motivation and engagement BIB011 . As previously mentioned, these affective factors are important in language learning, as they have an influence on ultimate success. Both storytelling and gamified learning are likely more engaging than some other methods that might be used (e.g., use of reading comprehension sets) that are not seen much in RALL. They also take particular advantage of the robot's embodiment and sociality. The point here is not to make suggestions about what method should be used, and in reality, multiple methods are often used at once (principle eclecticism). The point is to draw attention to the fact that in RALL, researchers make choices about how to use robots, albeit not always intentionally, and these choices will have differing impacts on learning outcomes.