This paper explores the motivation and prerequisites for successful integration of Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) tools into current foreign language teaching and learning (FLTL) practice. We focus on two aspects, which we argue to be important for effective ICALL system development and use: (i) the relationship between…

We present an evaluation of the Writing Pal (W-Pal) intelligent tutoring system (ITS) and the W-Pal automated writing evaluation (AWE) system through the use of computational indices related to text cohesion. Sixty-four students participated in this study. Each student was assigned to either the W-Pal ITS condition or the W-Pal AWE condition. The…

There is the question of whether learning differs when students speak versus type their responses when interacting with intelligent tutoring systems with natural language dialogues. Theoretical bases exist for three contrasting hypotheses. The "speech facilitation" hypothesis predicts that spoken input will "increase" learning,…

This article discusses the occurrence and measurement of self-regulated learning (SRL) both in human tutoring and in computer tutors with agents that hold conversations with students in natural language and help them learn at deeper levels. One challenge in building these computer tutors is to accommodate, encourage, and scaffold SRL because these…

This document describes a solution to a problem in the automatic content scoring of the multilingual character-by-character highlighting item type. This solution is language independent and represents a significant enhancement. This solution not only facilitates automatic scoring but plays an important role in clustering students' responses;…

While many studies have demonstrated that conversational tutoring systems have a positive effect on learning, the amount of manual effort required to author, design, and tune dialogue behaviors remains a major barrier to widespread deployment and adoption of these systems. Such dialogue systems must not only understand student speech, but must…

The current studies investigated the efficient use of dialogue in intelligent tutoring systems that use natural language interaction. Such dialogues can be relatively time-consuming. This work addresses the question of how much dialogue is needed to produce significant learning gains. In Experiment 1, a full dialogue condition and a read-only…

This paper proposes a generic methodology and architecture for developing a novel conversational intelligent tutoring system (CITS) called Oscar that leads a tutoring conversation and dynamically predicts and adapts to a student's learning style. Oscar aims to mimic a human tutor by implicitly modelling the learning style during tutoring, and…

Intelligent language tutoring systems (ILTS) typically analyze learner input to diagnose learner language properties and provide individualized feedback. Despite a long history of ILTS research, such systems are virtually absent from real-life foreign language teaching (FLT). Taking a step toward more closely linking ILTS research to real-life…

The paper advocates an approach to learning design that considers it as creating digital artefacts that can be extended, modified and used for different purposes. This is realised through an "act becoming artefact" cycle, where users' actions in the authors' software environment, named Learning Designer, are automatically interpreted on…

Pedagogical strategies are policies for a tutor to decide the next action when there are multiple actions available. When the content is controlled to be the same across experimental conditions, there has been little evidence that tutorial decisions have an impact on students' learning. In this paper, we applied Reinforcement Learning (RL) to…

This paper describes My Science Tutor (MyST), an intelligent tutoring system designed to improve science learning by students in 3rd, 4th and 5th grades (7 to 11 years old) through conversational dialogs with a virtual science tutor. In our study, individual students engage in spoken dialogs with the virtual tutor Marni during 15 to 20 minute…

Tutorial Dialog Systems that employ Conversational Agents (CAs) to deliver instructional content to learners in one-on-one tutoring settings have been shown to be effective in multiple learning domains by multiple research groups. Our work focuses on extending this successful learning technology to collaborative learning settings involving two or…

Emotional expression in Artificial Intelligence has gained lots of attention in recent years, people applied its affective computing not only in enhancing and realizing the interaction between computers and human, it also makes computer more humane. In this study, emotional expressions were applied into intelligent tutoring system, where learners'…

This paper describes the role of simulation-based training in the military. Interviews and observations of military instructors in the damage control and shiphandling domains provide examples of how the instructors extend the student's training beyond the well-defined simulated world with qualitative reasoning about context, hypothetical variants,…