Continuous Interaction with a Virtual Human

Attentive Speaking and Active Listening require that a Virtual Human be capable of simultaneous perception/interpretation and production of communicative behavior. A Virtual Human should be able to signal its attitude and attention while it is listening to its interaction partner, and be able to attend to its interaction partner while it is speaking – and modify its communicative behavior on-the-fly based on what it perceives from its partner. This report presents the results of a four week summer project that was part of eNTERFACE’10. The project resulted in progress on several aspects of continuous interaction such as scheduling and interrupting multimodal behavior, automatic classification of listener responses, generation of response eliciting behavior, and models for appropriate reactions to listener responses. A pilot user study was conducted with ten participants. In addition, the project yielded a number of deliverables that are released for public access

Second Language Acquisition and Form-Focused Instruction in Immersion: Teaching for Learning

While research on language immersion education has highlighted a multitude of benefits such as cognitive skills, academic achievement and language and literacy development, some studies have also identified challenges to its effective implementation, particularly as they relate to language acquisition. It has been suggested that the less than optimal levels of students’ immersion language “persist in part because immersion teachers lack systematic approaches for integrating language into their content instruction” (Tedick, Christian, & Fortune, 2011, p. 7). Students’ interlanguage has aspects that are borrowed, transferred and generalised from the mother tongue and differs from both the immersion language and the mother tongue. After a period of sustained development, interlanguage appears to stabilise and certain non-target like features tend to fossilise. Research has long suggested that effective immersion pedagogy needs to counterbalance both form-oriented and meaning-oriented approaches. This paper reviews the literature in relation to the linguistic deficiencies in immersion students’ L2 proficiency and form-focused instruction is examined as a viable solution to this pedagogic puzzle. Key instructional elements of form-focused instruction are unpacked and some pedagogical possibilities are considered in an attempt to identify and discuss strategies that will enable immersion learners to refine their grammatical and lexical systems as they proceed

Methodological issues in research on learner-computer interactions in CALL

CALL materials may provide a mechanism for implementing theoretically-ideal conditions for second language acquisition and for conducting empirical research to investigate effects of these conditions. This paper explores methodological issues involved in realizing this potential by focusing on investigation of the noticing hypothesis (Schmidt, 1990) in CALL reading materials. It reviews the problem of assessing noticing in classroom and experimental settings through a) conditions for noticing, b) retrospective assessment, and c) concurrent assessment. Concurrent assessment, which provides the most direct measure of noticing, is illustrated through CALL materials that gather data on noticing, test retention of word meaning, and calculate the correlation between noticed and remembered words. Methodological issues of implementation and validation are discussed

Negotiations for meaning in the context of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game

This study investigated negotiations for meaning as conditions for second language (L2) learning in the context of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft (WoW) (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004). Varonis and Gass’s (1985) and Smith’s (2003a) models were used to identify negotiation episodes during on-task and off-task talks among the participants while playing WoW. The participants were six non-native (NNS) and one native English speaker (NS). The NNSs were divided into two teams of three: Team 1 (T1) pre-intermediate and Team 2 (T2) upper-intermediate. The NS played the game with both teams. The study lasted for six months and resulted in 59.96 hours of recorded audio and nine hours of screen-recorded gaming sessions. Negotiation patterns were compared across the L2 proficiency levels and three different types of dyads. The results revealed that (a) T1 encountered more communication breakdowns, but T2 engaged in more negotiations, (b) T1 engaged in more complex negotiations, (c) breakdowns and negotiations occurred more during off-task talk, and (d) breakdowns were triggered more by the NS’s utterances in T1 and by NNSs’ utterances in T2. The results also showed the participants’ abundant L2 use to undertake authentically contextualized game-driven tasks, meticulous involvement in bi- and multi-lateral negotiations, and creative strategies to resolve incomprehension

English Language Learning and Technology

The LL & LT monograph series publishes monographs as well as edited volumes on applied and methodological issues in the field of language pedagogy. The focus of the series is on subjects such as classroom discourse and interaction; language diversity in educational settings; bilingual education; language testing and language assessment; teaching methods and teaching performance; learning trajectories in second language acquisition; and written language learning in educational settings.https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/engl_books/1005/thumbnail.jp