How to Develop Learners' Politeness: A Study of RALL's Impact on Learning Greeting by Young Iranian EFL Learners

Abstract

This study explores the effect of RALL (Robot Assisted Language Learning) on instructing greeting to young EFL (English as Foreign Language) students in Tehran, Iran. To this end, 38 preschool EFL children ranging from 3 to 6 years old were randomly assigned to the RALL (19 students) and game-based (19 students) groups, and the greeting sentences were extracted from the Functional Communication in English book [1] and ESL library website scenarios. In addition, the robot for the RALL group was used as an assistant to the teacher while for the game-based group the instruction was based on gaming methods such as command, mystery bag, and pass the ball. The instructional duration for both groups took eight sessions in which the RALL group was 8 hours and the non-RALL group took 32 hours to cover the same materials. After completion, the post-test of both groups were analyzed using independent samples t-test. The results revealed that there was a significant difference between the RALL and game-based groups' posttest performance. Thus, it can be argued that the RALL instruction was more effective than the game-based one in improving students' performance in posttest. Finally, the current study introduced a new teaching method for teaching greeting to EFL kids by employing a humanoid robot as a teaching assistant in the field of language teaching and learning.