EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES ROBOT ASSISTED LANGUAGE LEARNING

Abstract

Along with the rapid development of information and communication technologies, educators are trying to keep up with the dramatic changes in our electronic environment. These days mobile technology, with popular devices such as iPhones, Android phones, and iPads, is steering our learning environment towards increasingly focusing on mobile learning or m-Learning. Currently, most interfaces employ keyboards, mouse or touch technology, but some emerging input-interfaces use voiceor marker-based gesture recognition. In the future, one of the cutting-edge technologies likely to be used is robotics. Robots are already being used in some classrooms and are receiving an increasing level of attention. Robots today are developed for special purposes, quite similar to personal computers in their early days. However, in the future, when mass production lowers prices, robots will bring about big changes in our society. In this column, the author focuses on educational service robots. Educational service robots for language learning and robot-assisted language learning (RALL) will be introduced, and the hardware and software platforms for RALL will be explored, as well as implications for future research.