Learning a foreign language vocabulary with a companion robot

Modern emotional companion robots can support multimodal communicative interaction with humans using speech, gestures, and facial expressions. This paper researches the potential of a social robot in the educational process: in a situation of learning a foreign language vocabulary. We have compared a classic text interface for word-learning with a companion robot, orally supporting the learning process of students (43 people, 34 women, average age 22.5years). It was shown that selection of one of the two methods does not affect the efficiency of word memorization, however, most of the students appreciate the robot as an assistant and indicate is as a preferable, or one of the possible learning tools in their future studies. The obtained results open up further prospects for using emotional companion robots in the educational process.