Can Conversational Agents Foster Learners’ Willingness To Communicate in a Second Language? : Effects of Communication Strategies and Affective Backchannels

Abstract

Willingness to communicate (WTC) in a second language (L2) is believed to have a direct and sustained influence on learners’ actual usage frequency of the targeted language. To help overcome the lack of suitable environments to increase L2 learners’ WTC, our approach is to build conversational agents that can help L2 learners overcome their apprehension towards communication in L2. In this paper, we focus on the dialogue management aspects of our approach and propose a model based on set of communication strategies (CS) and affective backchannels (AB) in order to foster agents’ ability to carry on natural and WTC friendly conversations with L2 learners. An evaluation of the proposed method led to two main findings. First, combining CS and AB empowers the conversational agent, making possible highly significant WTC gains among L2 learners in English as a foreign language context. Secondly, even a single implementation of AB proved to have the potential to enhance L2 learners’ WTC to some extent.