Using social robots for language learning: are we there yet?

Along with the development of speech and language technologies and growing market interest, social robots have attracted more academic and commercial attention in recent decades. Their multimodal embodiment offers a broad range of possibilities, which have gained importance in the education sector. It has also led to a new technology-based field of language education: robot-assisted language learning (RALL). RALL has developed rapidly in second language learning, especially driven by the need to compensate for the shortage of first-language tutors. There are many implementation cases and studies of social robots, from early government-led attempts in Japan and South Korea to increasing research interests in Europe and worldwide. Compared with RALL used for English as a foreign language (EFL), however, there are fewer studies on applying RALL for teaching Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). One potential reason is that RALL is not well-known in the CFL field. This scope review paper attempts to fill this gap by addressing the balance between classroom implementation and research frontiers of social robots. The review first introduces the technical tool used in RALL, namely the social robot, at a high level. It then presents a historical overview of the real-life implementation of social robots in language classrooms in East Asia and Europe. It then provides a summary of the evaluation of RALL from the perspectives of L2 learners, teachers and technology developers. The overall goal of this paper is to gain insights into RALL's potential and challenges and identify a rich set of open research questions for applying RALL to CFL. It is hoped that the review may inform interdisciplinary analysis and practice for scientific research and front-line teaching in future.

Picturing Organisms and Their Environments: Interaction, Transaction, and Constitution Loops

Changing conceptions of the relation between organisms and their environments make up a crucial chapter in the history of psychology. This may be approached by a comparative study of how schematic diagrams portray this relation. Diagrams drive the communication and the teaching of ideas, the sedimentation of epistemic norms and methods of analysis, and in some cases the articulation of novel concepts through pictographic variants. Through a sampling of schematic representations, I offer a concise comparison of how different authors, with different interests and motivations, have portrayed important aspects of the organism–environment relation. I compare example diagrams according to the features they underscore (or omit) and group them into classes that emphasize interaction, transaction, and constitution loops.

Sentence Context and Word-Picture Cued-Recall Paired-Associate Learning Procedure Boosts Recall in Normal and Mild Alzheimer's Disease Patients

Introduction

The aim of this study was to employ the word-picture paradigm to examine the effectiveness of combined pictorial illustrations and sentences as strong contextual cues. The experiment details the performance of word recall in healthy older adults (HOA) and mild Alzheimer's disease (AD). The researchers enhanced the words' recall with word-picture condition and when the pair was associated with a sentence contextualizing the two items.

Method

The sample was composed of 18 HOA and 18 people with mild AD. Participants memorized 15 pairs of words under word-word and word-picture conditions, with and without a sentence context. In the paired-associate test, the first item of the pair was read aloud by participants and used to elicit retrieval of the associated item.

Results

The findings suggest that both HOA and mild-AD pictures improved item recall compared to word condition such as sentences which further enabled item recall. Additionally, the HOA group performs better than the mild-AD group in all conditions.

Conclusions

Word-picture and sentence context strengthen the encoding in the explicit memory task, both in HOA and mild AD. These results open a potential window to improve the memory for verbalized instructions and restore sequential abilities in everyday life, such as brushing one's teeth, fastening one's pants, or drying one's hands.