Learning by Teaching Partner Robot in Collaborative Reading

Collaborative reading is an important activity for second language learners to practice communication. However, it is not easy for Japanese learners to read English sentences with a partner due to their embarrassment and lack of confidence. Our previous work has suggested that collaborative reading with a partner robot can reduce learners' psychological reluctance. On the other hand, there was a problem that some learners focused on reading English sentences in collaborative reading. In other words, learners did not care what the partner robot reads. In this work, we have developed a learning environment where a robot reads English sentences with incorrect grammar in collaborative reading, and learners teach the robot the grammatical mistakes. We also conducted a case study with 9 participants whose purpose was to evaluate learners' prosociality against the partner robot and the effectiveness of learning-by-teaching. The results suggest the possibility that learners improve their prosociality via teaching activity, and that teaching activity promotes reflection on their grammatical knowledge.