Spoken Conversational Interaction for Language Learning

This paper describes our efforts towards utilizing multilingual spoken dialogue systems as an aid to second language acquisition. We argue that it is important for language students to have the opportunity to practice communication in a non-threatening environment, something that a computer can naturally provide. We envision a three-stage interaction focused around a specific topic of a lesson plan. The first stage would familiarize the student with the vocabulary and syntax by presenting simulated dialogues at a Web page. The second stage would involve spoken dialogue interaction with the computer, either at a workstation or on the telephone. The third stage would provide feedback to the user on the quality of the utterances they recorded during the dialogue exchange. We have thus far concentrated on Mandarin and English as the two languages, where the system can be configured reversibly to support either learning English or Mandarin. We have begun to develop dialogue interaction capabilities for a number of domains centered around the scenario of a traveler to a