Abstract:

The paper aims to study the messenging applications and the fields where they can be used beneficially for educational purposes. Using chatbots in education is just an emerging area. Chatbots, conversational software algorithm, which can respond to inputs, understand commands and execute tasks, can be of help to educators in solving the problem of individual student’s support and building learning ecosystem with safe environments to master the basics of foreign language and train communication skills.

A longitudinal research was undertaken involving the focus group of 138 students (75 men and 63 women) from 16 countries studying Russian and 45 Russian students studying English to track changes in language skills and in perceptions of their learning environments after using multifunctional Telegram chatbot. Questionnaires and interviews were used to examine and compare the progress of the students and psychological adjustment of the students in blended learning.

The methods applied are: a questionnaire, students’ interviews.
It was found that bot as an interactive agent played an important part in encouraging students to improve their learning and giving immediate feedback to students with different learning characteristics and learning speed. These results support the hypothesis that Telegram chatbot with wide scope of functionality can be easily adapted and integrated in the classroom. The findings support the idea that chatbots can help to organize the conversations through voice recognition and chat interfaces, and it results in enhanced learning process.

It can be concluded that an advantage to e-learning emerging from this study is that it opens up new mediums of communication expanding on those traditionally associated with classroom teaching.

The limitations of the project stem from the complexity of changing the traditional approach to teaching conversational skills. A more large scale study would benefit the research society.

Keywords:

Chatbot, blended learning, higher education, communication skills.