A developmental plan for an English conversation learning chatbot through the application of elementary school English textbooks

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to provide practical suggestions for the development of English conversation learning chatbot through the application of elementary school English textbooks. For this purpose, this study investigated and reanalyzed the dialogs between chatbots and human users utilized in previous studies. English learning chatbots for those studies were not able to perform continuous conversations with human users. Moreover, the dialogs of the chatbots were not properly composed for children learning elementary level English. Thus, this study suggested practical considerations for the development of English learning chatbots for elementary school students through the application of elementary school English textbooks. First, dialogs should be composed of a conversation scenario. Second, the difficulty level of the dialogs must be carefully considered based on length of a sentence, selection of vocabulary, and cognitive development of children. Finally, a variety of expressions based on situations and conversation counterparts must be considered. With these considerations, this study proposed English conversation learning chatbot building process with Dialogflow through the application of an elementary English textbook.