The impact of intelligent personal assistants on learners’ autonomous learning of second language listening and speaking

ABSTRACT

Research has revealed the positive impact of intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) on L2 learners’ oral development and learning attitude. These studies, however, focused mostly on the in-class use of IPAs, with existing research on the out-of-class use being exploratory. To fill the gap of lacking empirical investigations on IPA-based autonomous second language learning (ASLL), this study recruited 34 college EFL learners to use Google Assistant (GA) in their respective homes for six weeks and examined their listening and speaking development afterwards. Each week, participants received an email about the new commands for them to explore, and half of them were additionally given sustained teacher guidance (i.e. weekly evaluation forms) on the usefulness of each command to better enhance their participation. Statistical analysis on the participants’ learning gains demonstrated that participants receiving weekly evaluation forms made significant improvement in both listening and speaking skills, and they even outperformed those without weekly evaluation forms in their oral development. Nevertheless, there was no significant difference in the two groups’ listening gains. These findings demonstrate that, with sustained teacher guidance, IPAs have great potential in L2 oral development in ASLL context, but more long-term studies on IPAs’ impact for L2 listening should be conducted.

KEYWORDS:

• Intelligent personal assistants
• Google Assistant
• L2 listening
• L2 speaking
• autonomous second language learning

Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the “Chinese Language and Technology Center” of National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education(MOE) in Taiwan.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://assistant.google.com/explore?hl=en_us

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Chinese Language and Technology Center of National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education(MOE) in Taiwan.

Notes on contributors

Christine Ting-Yu Yang

Christine Ting-Yu Yang is currently a research assistant in the English Department at National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan. Her research interests include computer-assisted language learning and corpus linguistics.

Shu-Li Lai

Shu-Li Lai (Ph.D. in TESOL) is an assistant professor at National Taipei University of Business, Taiwan. Her research interests include computer-assisted language learning, and corpus-assisted EFL writing.

Howard Hao-Jan Chen

Howard Hao-Jan Chen (Ph. D, University of Pennsylvania) is Professor of English Department at National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan. Professor Chen has extensive experiences developing various CALL websites and he also published several papers in CALL Journal, ReCALL Journal and several related language learning journals. His research interests include computer-assisted language learning, corpus research, and second language acquisition. He is now developing and maintaining a large English Learning website, Cool English, serving 260,000 elementary and secondary school students in Taiwan.