Abstract
Educational robots have become popular and mature in lots of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) applications in recent years. This paper reports the development of an English Teaching Assistant Robot (ETAR) and its effects on in-class English learning motivation for the first-year university students in Taiwan. The study uses the social robot NAO, with voice and interactive functions, as a classroom assistant to help teachers to train students’ spoken English in the classroom, including single-word and text reading aloud practice, sing-a-song as well as rollcall in class. After a six-week experiment, the results show that the introduction of the ETAR to the freshman English class improved students’ English learning motivation. Moreover, the teachers’ burden of some fixed mechanical work such as rollcall, word pronunciation, and text reading aloud practice can be reduced, and then teachers can have more energy to take care of more low learning-achievement students.
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Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C. for the financial support under the Grant numbers MOST106-2511-S-035-003-MY2 and MOST108-2511-H-035-002-MY2.
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Shen, WW., Tsai, MH.M., Wei, GC., Lin, CY., Lin, JM. (2019). ETAR: An English Teaching Assistant Robot and Its Effects on College Freshmen’s In-Class Learning Motivation. In: Rønningsbakk, L., Wu, TT., Sandnes, F., Huang, YM. (eds) Innovative Technologies and Learning. ICITL 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11937. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35343-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35343-8_9
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