Motivation

Acquiring a foreign language such as English requires a lot of speaking practice, ideally with native speakers in real-life scenarios. In order to learn, learners should receive feedback on how to correct their expression if errors occur during speech production. The traditional school context makes it difficult to provide every learner with a daily opportunity for this. 

Goals and approach

The Aisla project aims to solve this problem by providing each English learner with a private language partner in the form of a tutoring system to practice English in real-life scenarios. Aisla is implemented as a mobile app that is able to identify the scenario the learner is in (e.g., a restaurant) and suggest appropriate learning tasks (e.g., placing an order). Learners can then use spoken English to complete the task, with Aisla acting as a conversational partner. During the interaction, Aisla also provides feedback on language errors and provides materials to help learners progress. The intelligent assistant is powered by the latest speech processing and artificial intelligence technologies, as well as research findings in second language acquisition.

Innovations and perspectives

Learners are given unlimited opportunities to practice English with a competent interlocutor in various contexts of daily life. English language learning becomes an attractive process because of the opportunity to use the language to accomplish concrete tasks.

For more info on this project, click here: https://www.interaktive-technologien.de/projekte/aisla