We report four experiments investigating the effect of prosody on listening comprehension in 11-13-year-old children. Across all experiments, participants listened to short object descriptions and answered content-based questions about said objects. In Experiments 1-3, the descriptions were read in an emotionally positive or neutral tone of voice.…

Automating the classification of instructional strategies from a large-scale online tutorial dialogue corpus is indispensable to the design of dialogue-based intelligent tutoring systems. Despite many existing studies employing supervised machine learning (ML) models to automate the classification process, they concluded that building a…

While recent studies have demonstrated the potential of automated feedback to enhance teacher instruction in virtual settings, its efficacy in traditional classrooms remains unexplored. In collaboration with TeachFX, we conducted a pre-registered randomized controlled trial involving 523 Utah mathematics and science teachers to assess the impact…

Mobile artifacts are the objects that increasingly surround us in life. They provide us with the opportunity to engage in activities outside the traditional context and at our own pace. In this article, we present the results of the tests of our mobile application intended for the learning of the French language with the concept of SPOC with a…

Artificial intelligence (AI) for supporting second language (L2) writing processes and practices has garnered increasing interest in recent years, establishing AI-mediated L2 writing as a new norm for many multilingual classrooms. As such, the emergence of AI-mediated technologies has challenged L2 writing instructors and their philosophies…

Intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) is a multidisciplinary area of research that combines natural language processing (NLP), intelligent tutoring system (ITS), second language acquisition (SLA), and foreign language teaching and learning (FLTL). Intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) are able to provide a personalized approach to…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays an increasingly important role in language education; however, the trends, research issues, and applications of AI in language learning remain largely under-investigated. Accordingly, the present paper, using bibliometric analysis, investigates these issues via a review of 516 papers published between 2000 and…

iSTART is a web-based reading comprehension tutor. A recent translation of iSTART from English to Spanish has made the system available to a new audience. In this paper, we outline several challenges that arose during the development process, specifically focusing on the algorithms that drive the feedback. Several iSTART activities encourage…

This article describes the development of a tense and aspect identifier, an online tool designed to help learners of English by harnessing a natural language processing pipeline to automatically classify verb groups into one of 12 grammatical tenses. Currently, there is no website or application that can automatically identify tense in context,…

The 27th European Association of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (EUROCALL) conference was hosted by UCLouvain in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium), in collaboration with KU Leuven, from the 28th to the 31st of August 2019. The theme selected for the 2019 EuroCALL conference held in Louvain-la-Neuve was "CALL and complexity." As languages…

This paper presents a rule-based task-oriented dialogue system for second language learning and a knowledge extraction method which automatically extracts the training data for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and dialogue rules for dialogue management from a Dialogue Map (DM). The DM consists of turn-by-turn utterances between the system and…

This study investigates the extent to which microfeatures -- such as basic text features, readability, cohesion, and lexical diversity based on specific word lists -- affect Chinese EFL writing quality. Data analysis was conducted using natural language processing, correlation analysis and stepwise multiple regression analysis on a corpus of 268…

Collaborative problem solving in computer-supported environments is of critical importance to the modern workforce. Coworkers or collaborators must be able to co-create and navigate a shared problem space using discourse and non-verbal cues. Analyzing this discourse can give insights into how consensus is reached and can estimate the depth of…

Despite the promise of research conducted at the intersection of computer-assisted language learning (CALL), natural language processing, and second language acquisition, few studies have explored the potential benefits of using intelligent CALL systems to deepen our understanding of the process and products of second language (L2) learning. The…

Although data collection has been used in language learning settings for some time, it is only in recent decades that large corpora have become available, along with efficient tools for their use. Advances in natural language processing (NLP) have enabled rich tagging and annotation of corpus data, essential for their effective use in language…