Abstract:

Practising speaking a foreign language and participation in social interaction is generally considered to prompt the development of speaking skills when learning a new language. A spoken dialogue system with a virtual human as a conversational agent replacing the human being as the counterpart in one-to-one spoken conversation can provide this opportunity for students in simulated everyday life scenarios. This learning situation gives other conditions than in human-human verbal interaction, for example, no real possibilities for mutuality in experiences. There is a need for a framework adapted for organisation and analysis of data exploring from a student perspective their self-reported experiences of speaking a foreign language with a virtual human and of practising speaking skills in a spoken dialogue system. Here we introduce a framework as an analytical lens, the Framework of Student - Conversational Agent Interaction (FoSCAI). FoSCAI is inspired by the Relationship of Inquiry framework (RoI), an adaption from the Community of Inquiry framework. RoI consists of four interdependent elements; cognitive, teaching, social, and emotional presence, and is developed for analysing the process of an online learning experience between a student and tutor. Instead of focusing on the written interactions in the learning environment, FoSCAI focuses on students’ experiences of the learning situation with the spoken dialogue system. The experiences are operationalised into four interrelated and overlapping dimensions; cognitive, teaching, social, and emotional. The framework consists of two parts, where the first part explores the overall experience of speaking with a conversational agent. The second part explores the experiences of practising speaking skills activities in the whole spoken dialogue system with the conversational agent. Together, the two parts capture the students’ educational experience of their learning situation when practising speaking a foreign language in a spoken dialogue system. In the first part of the framework, the focus lies on the students' cognitive, social, and emotional experiences of speaking with the conversational agent. The teaching experience is not fully visible in this part due to constraints of the current design of virtual humans as conversational agents in the conversation, for example giving instant feedback but not explicitly tutoring students. In the second part of the framework, the teaching dimension of experience refers to both the whole system including its supportive features and the students’ own support of their learning process. Subsequently, the teaching dimension of experience is of major focus in the second part of the framework. In combination with the other three dimensions, it explores students’ experiences of practising speaking skill activities in a spoken dialogue system. The framework attempts to visualise the complex reality of student - conversational agent interaction to gain knowledge of this kind of learning situation. Instruments used to produce data for applying the newly designed FoSCAI in a study in a formal education setting on Swedish lower secondary school students have been digital logbooks and questionnaires, designed based on this framework. Refinement and further elaboration of FoSCAI are needed for future use in this kind of educational research regarding spoken dialogue systems with conversational agents assisting language learning, especially speaking skills.

Keywords:

Spoken dialogue system, conversational agent, foreign language, speaking skills, interaction, students’ experiences, framework, Community of Inquiry.