The influence of robot-assisted language learning on language teachers and learners

The influence of robot-assisted language learning on language teachers and learners

Artificial intelligence as a trending topic in the global society has affected the trend of technology-enhanced language learning. Robots have become the popular tools in the educations. Many governments, scholars, and educators have also advocated that integrating robots with different school subjects can effectively benefit students' learning in multidimensional ways, for example, promote learners' learning motivation, concentration, interest and academic achievement, and language skills improvement. Learners can naturally improve their cognitive and metacognitive skills via the interaction among robots, teachers, and peers. In the previous literature, robots have also widely implemented in the language classrooms to promote students' language proficiencies, learning motivation, and learning efficacies. Despite the fact that robot-enhanced learning can largely decrease teachers' teaching burden and help them provide more effective pedagogy for students to experience a better learning environment, teachers still find it challenging while integrating robots in their classrooms. To help them tackle these identified challenges, this article encourages teachers to become instructional designers through engaging themselves in collaborative and hands-on activities. Through the collaborative and communicative design process, they are able to sharpen their instructional design skills while repeatedly negotiating, discussing, and reflecting with their colleagues. Furthermore, this article suggests teacher trainers constructing a technology-enhanced learning instructional design system to guide novice teachers about how to integrate educational robots into language subjects and design robot-enhanced units of learning to help students perceive better language learning experiences.