Chatbot for the Improvement of Conversational Skills of Japanese Language Learners

Abstract

Conversation practice is essential for second-language acquisition and necessary for learners to reach an acceptable communicative level. In an ideal scenario, students should regularly hold conversations with native speakers of the target language, but this is often not possible. Although the teachers use the target language during the classes, they cannot offer a continuous conversation with each student, and they are usually not available wherever and whenever the student requires them to practice. This chapter presents the development and use of a mobile application to hold conversations in the Japanese language. The objective is to provide a software tool to improve the level of communicative competence (both inside and outside a classroom environment). So, the authors created and used a conversational agent (chatbot) using Dialogflow (a Google API), which is connected to the application's interface through the Internet using a client access token to give responses to user inputs in real time.