Affective Mobile Language Tutoring System for Supporting Language Learning

Abstract

Students often face difficulties and experience negative emotions toward second language learning. The affective tutoring system (ATS) is a next-generation learning approach that can detect the affective status of learning to increase performance. Therefore, for the purposes of this study, an innovative affective mobile language tutoring system (AMLTS) was designed to support Japanese language learning. The effects of AMLTS, along with asynchronous discussion, that were intended to improve performance, were examined using a triangulation method. To investigate the effect on emotion, the proposed AMLTS provides a virtual emotion agent that can interact with users and record emotional events, learning assessments, and the results of the interaction into a database. Learning effectiveness evaluations were conducted via two experiments: prototype evaluation and final evaluation. Sixty-three students, all beginners, were invited to use the AMLTS to learn Japanese. The research results show that the proposed AMLTS affective interaction design significantly improves learner engagement and performance. In the emotion feedback analysis and learning process, AMLTS helped students deepen their understanding of the content, enabled them to clearly understand the content, and to engage in peer interaction and experience positive emotions. In the evaluation of system usability, AMLTS reveals good usability for foreign language acquisition.