Proposing a task-oriented chatbot system for EFL learners speaking practice

Many learners of English as a foreign language often feel that learning spoken English is frustrating and quite difficult, especially when they have to talk to English-speaking foreigners. In general, because they are unfamiliar with the spoken mode of English and are worried about making grammatical errors, they often feel very scared to speak English. Furthermore, spoken language and reading differ in many ways. For instance, when seeing text containing new words, learners can stop and look up words in a dictionary. Additionally, a passage can be read multiple times by learners to understand it. Conversely, spoken language must be understood immediately in order to communicate effectively. The purpose of this study is to propose an interactive chatbot system named TPBOT which stands for "TOEIC Practice Chatbot" for EFL learners to eliminate their fear of speaking English and enable them to chat with online chatbots to practice spoken English at any time. This TPBOT would be very helpful to eliminate learners' anxiety about speaking a foreign language with foreigners. Participants in this study are Taiwanese students whose oral scores on the TOEIC (R) test are below 100. They hope to improve their oral English ability after participating in the four-month experiment. The results have shown that students are satisfied with using this TPBOT and believe that it has indeed helped them improve their English speaking skills. Obviously, the TPBOT was very effective for the intended purpose. For educators, the TPBOT is very useful to build learning content in the TPBOT, provide learners with interactive exercises and improve learning effects.