Communication Strategies and Affective Backchannels for Conversational Agents to Enhance Learners' Willingness to Communicate in a Second Language

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 implement a WTC model based conversational agent. In this paper, we propose a dialogue management model based on set of communication strategies and affective backchannels in order to foster the agent's ability to carry on natural and WTC friendly conversations with L2 learners. We expect that combining communication strategies with affective backchannels can empower conversational agents to the extent to effectively help L2 learners recover from eventual communication pitfalls and create a warm conversation atmosphere.