BookBuddy: Turning Digital Materials Into Interactive Foreign Language Lessons Through a Voice Chatbot
Open accessAbstract
Digitization of education has brought a tremendous amount of online materials that are potentially useful for language learners to practice their reading skills. However, these digital materials rarely help with conversational practice, a key component of foreign language learning. Leveraging recent advances in chatbot technologies, we developed BookBuddy, a scalable virtual reading companion that can turn any reading material into an interactive conversation-based English lesson. We piloted our virtual tutor with five 6-year-old native Chinese-speaking children currently learning English. Preliminary results suggest that children enjoyed speaking English with our virtual tutoring chatbot and were highly engaged during the interaction.
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Some teaching agents engage students with a discussion in a storytelling style.
“some teaching agents engage students with a discussion in a storytelling style (Alobaidi et al., 2013;Ruan et al., 2019)”
From Interacting with educational chatbots: A systematic review (2023) · cites this paper as Ruan et al., 2019
The study by Ruan et al. (2019) reported high usefulness.
“| (Ruan et al., 2019) | Teaching agent, chatbot driven 5 | High engagement and | |”
From Interacting with educational chatbots: A systematic review (2023) · cites this paper as Ruan et al., 2019
The study by Ruan et al. (2019) reported high engagement.
“| (Ruan et al., 2019) | Teaching agent, chatbot driven 5 | High engagement and | |”
From Interacting with educational chatbots: A systematic review (2023) · cites this paper as Ruan et al., 2019
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Adiguzel, T., Kaya, M. H., & Cansu, F. K. (2023) · Contemporary Educational Technology · doi:10.30935/cedtech/13152 · Cited by 975 · see citing works
“Notably, AI facilitates ongoing dialogue and aids students in improving their communication abilities in language learning contexts (Vazquez-Cano, 2021) since it encourages collaborative learning (Ruan et al., 2019) and enhances peer communication skills (Hill et al., 2015).”
BackgroundChatbots applications in education: A systematic review
Okonkwo, C. W., & Ade-Ibijola, A. (2021) · Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.1016/j.caeai.2021.100033 · Cited by 879 · see citing works
Interacting with educational chatbots: A systematic review
Kuhail, M. A., Alturki, N., Alramlawi, S., & Alhejori, K. (2023) · Education and Information Technologies · doi:10.1007/s10639-022-11177-3 · Cited by 841 · see citing works
Rediscovering the use of chatbots in education: A systematic literature review
Pérez, J. Q., Daradoumis, T., & Puig, J. M. M. (2020) · Computer Applications in Engineering Education · doi:10.1002/cae.22326 · Cited by 483 · see citing works
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Proposing a task-oriented chatbot system for EFL learners speaking practice
Hsu, M.-H., Chen, P.-S., & Yu, C.-S. (2023) · Interactive Learning Environments · doi:10.1080/10494820.2021.1960864 · Cited by 119 · see citing works
Online chat and chatbots to enhance mature student engagement in higher education
Abbas, N., Whitfield, J., Atwell, E., Bowman, H., Pickard, T., & Walker, A. (2022) · International Journal of Lifelong Education · doi:10.1080/02601370.2022.2066213 · Cited by 116 · see citing works
Zhu, Y., Zhu, C., Wu, T., Wang, S., Zhou, Y., Chen, J., Wu, F., & Li, Y. (2025) · Education and Information Technologies · doi:10.1007/s10639-024-12898-3 · Cited by 33 · see citing works
- Authors
- Ruan, S., Willis, A., Xu, Q., Davis, G. M., Jiang, L., Brunskill, E., & Landay, J. A.
- Affiliations
- Stanford University (US)
- Tsinghua University (CN)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the Sixth (2019) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2019-06-24
- Pages
- 1-4
- OpenAlex
- W2965578234
- Cited by
- 81
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 23 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 14 · 2020: 4
- FWCI
- 2.72
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (L@S) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Intelligent Tutoring Systems and Adaptive Learning
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech and dialogue systems
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Keywords
- speaking activities, English as a foreign language, young learners, Chinese-speaking children, digital language learning, child engagement
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