Communication Tasks Using Intelligent Agents in Second Life

Abstract

** Invited as a paper from E-Learn 2011 **Numerous attempts have been made to use Second Life (SL) as a platform for language teaching. As a result, the possibility of SL as a means to promote conversational interactions has been reported. However, research has thus far largely focused on simply using SL without further augmentations for communication between learners or between teachers and learners in a school-like environment. Conversely, not enough attention has been paid to its controllability, which builds on the embedded functions in SL. This study, based on the result of the authors’ previous research, involves the implementation of a virtual communication task space called an automatized interactive task space (AITS) where robotic agents work as interlocutors of learners. On this platform, a series of experiments were conducted to examine whether AITS is effective in promoting language learning and communicative interactions. The number of occurrences of negotiations of meaning and the discourse analysis of the speech logs were used as measures to evaluate the results. This paper presents the improved implementation method to construct AITS, and the result of the evaluation experiments conducted on the constructed AITS.