Animated Pedagogical Agents as Attention Grabbers: On Agent Based Instruction and Its Implications for Teaching L2 Collocations

Publish Year: 1397
نوع سند: مقاله کنفرانسی
زبان: English
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ELSCONF06_145

تاریخ نمایه سازی: 8 تیر 1398

Abstract:

From all technological breakthroughs of the 21st century, Animated Pedagogical Agents (APA) have marked a majormilestone in education by capitalizing on the social agency theory, and consequently, simulating human-to-humaninteraction characterized by joint participation in communicative acts, group problem-solving, peer collaboration, aswell as collective assessment of learning outcomes. The social agency theory suggests that lifelike virtual tutors offerthe potential to serve as social agents with whom learners can develop a joint partnership, continually monitoring andregulating their learning processes as a result of the feedback they receive through mediation and reflection. An addedbenefit of learning together with pedagogical agents is that they have proved to serve as potential attention grabbers,raising learners’ curiosity and focusing their attention on the salient aspects of the learning tasks. This is of greatconsequence when it comes to the learning of target language features whose mastery warrants careful attention toform. Inspired by these postulations, the present study reports on the results of an experiment that sought to compare theeffects, if any, of agent-based instruction with those of teacher fronted instruction on the learning of L2 collocationsamong Iranian EFL learners. To this aim, 30 EFL learners were randomly assigned into two study groups ofexperimental and control who then received instruction on 80 English collocates under one of two treatment conditions:The experimental group received treatment via a multimedia courseware that featured animated characters and virtualtutors establishing the context and setting the scene for introducing target L2 collocates in appropriate context of use.Specifically, whereas the agents would use eye gaze, pointing, and other paralinguistic behaviors to garner and focusthe participants’ attention to example structures presenting the L2 collocates, thereby aiding learners to fix the form inmemory, their provision of verbal explanations would help with the internalization of meaning and meaning-making ontheir part. The control group, on the other hand, received instruction from a human teacher, where a similar strategy wasemployed for the presentation of the same L2 collocates. A posttest was then administered at the end of the experimentto gauge the size of both within- and between-subjects effects. The results revealed that both groups made significantprogress over the course of the experiment; however, the mean difference was in favor of the experimental group.Among the proposed explanations is the idea that, in antithesis to teacher fronted instruction characterized by itsrelatively undue emphasis on contextualization and meaning acquisition, agent-based instruction represents a morebalanced approach where equal importance is accorded to form and meaning, resulting in stronger form-meaningmapping, and in turn, in seamless knowledge construction on the part of learners.

Authors

Hamed Babaie

Department of English Language, College of HumanitiesRasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Rasht, Iran

Narges Mohammadi Soroush

Department of English Language, College of Humanities Rasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Rasht, Iran