Intelligent Automated Strategies of Teaching Foreign Language in Context

Trends in foreign language teaching for instructional settings are fundamentally motivated by our understanding of the essence of language, characteristics of human learning, and a human’s capacity to learn a language other than the native language. Following from our understanding in those areas, we have developed a prototype intelligent, automated, foreign language tutoring system, based on principles of contextualized, communicative language teaching. Our system emphasizes the exclusive or near exclusive use of the foreign language in meaningful situations, interactive instructional sequences, highly sensitive computer responses to the inputs of individual students, including the use of a natural language processing system to evaluate free text inputs, and the use of a variety of different types of practice exercises and media. We are building a system for developing lessons that function like a gifted teacher, and at the same time, are useful as research testbeds.