During this crisis due to the Coronavirus, the VTÉ will be organising a disciplinary webinar on the use of artificial intelligence in supporting online language teaching. All teachers and learners who are interested or who wish to integrate these tools into their online language courses are invited to complete the registration form here.
One of our presenters, Souheila Moussalli, a language school head teacher and a doctoral candidate at Concordia University, studies the use of intelligent personal assistants (IPAs). Over the course of 3 research studies, she aims to discover the pedagogical value of IPAs for supporting language learners in their oral competencies. For example, in her recent study, she has focused on how Amazon Alexa can help students of English as a second language produce regular past tense verbs (otherwise known as -ed verbs: talked /t/ versus played /d/ versus demanded /ɪd/). Throughout her research, she highlights the strengths and weaknesses of intelligent personal assistants, investigates human-machine interaction for language pedagogy and tries to determine whether Amazon Alexa is able to help English language learners develop their oral skills. To summarize, her research examines the pedagogical use of IPAs as a supporting tool for teachers and as an effective learning approach when used as an extension of traditional face to face teaching.
