A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Oral Comprehension <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> BIB001 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Oral Comprehension <s> This research explores feasibility of using intellectual robots as a language instruction tool for young children. Since the intellectual robots have several sensors which can recognize status of the other parties, it can perform various bi-directional interaction strategies. This study verified how such bi-directional interaction using intellectual robots affects the improvement of linguistic ability. The subjects were 34 4-year-old children, 17 of whom were in the traditional media-assisted reading program, and 17 of whom were in the Robot-assisted reading program. The results indicated that the children in the robot-assisted groups improved significantly compared with media-assisted groups in linguistic ability (story making, understanding, word recognition, PPVT (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test)). Furthermore, the benefits and limitations of using Intelligent Robot in linguistic education are discussed. <s> BIB002 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Oral Comprehension <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> BIB003 </s> A Survey of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) <s> Oral Comprehension <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> BIB004
The effects of robots on oral comprehension are mixed. Neither Lee et al. BIB003 or Kanda et al. BIB001 saw any overall improvements in listening ability among beginning students. In Kanda et al. BIB001 , however, those students who interacted with the robot more during the second (and last) week of the interaction showed significant improvement. It is important to note that in Kanda's study, interaction was voluntary at recess, so improvements might only be expected for children who interacted more with the robot. It could also represent a self-selection bias, where those students with better pre-existing English skills chose to interact more. In Lee's eight-week study, intermediate students actually had significantly worse listening scores at the conclusion of the study. "This finding can be explained by a number of factors such as the unsatisfactory quality of the text-to-speech component and the robots' various sound effects" [66:46] . By contrast, Hong et al. BIB004 noted improvement in the listening ability of students. This difference was significant even by comparison to a control group, a similar classroom environment, lacking only the presence of the robot. In another experiment, comprehension of four-year-old children using a robot improved over that of a control group who used computers BIB002 . Of note is that Hong et al. BIB004 and Kanda et al. BIB001 used pre-recorded voices, while Lee et al. BIB003 and Hyun et al. BIB002 used TTS. While use of TTS vs natural voice could potentially cause differences in understanding (as tested by human interlocutors with native accents), this suggests that other variables are also at play, only one of which may be the quality of TTS. Still, it is recommended that native speech be used in RALL, and if that is not a possibility, then the quality of TTS is high. It is hard to completely reconcile the above findings. As well, how effects on oral comprehension when using robots compare to similar training when listening to audio from an app, computer, or virtual character is largely unstudied. It is important to assess if robots (due to their embodiment and sociality) offer unique advantages in this area. More research needs to be conducted into how using robots might (or might not) offer unique advantages in improving listening comprehension.