Giving Compass' Take:

• Frederick Hess at Education Next discusses research on language teaching robots, how they work in a classroom setting, their overall effectiveness and the challenges that come with. 

• How would the advancement of language robots affect teacher employment? 

• Here's how language technology such as learning apps are helping refugees. 

Education technology has many faces. A prominent one has long been computer-assisted language learning, offering great promise for struggling readers, non-English speakers, or those seeking to master a second tongue. And, in recent years, the technology has raced ahead. No longer do students simply repeat what they hear through headphones or get instruction from a computer screen—now they can talk to ROBOTS. How cool is that? The question, of course, is: Do robots actually help?

Earlier this spring, in the Review of Educational Research, three Dutch academics offered a useful survey of what we know about robot instruction on vocabulary, reading skills, grammar, and more, in “Social Robots for Language Learning: A Review.” Social robots, as Rianne van den Berghe et al. explain, are “specifically designed to interact and communicate with people, either semiautonomously or autonomously . . . following behavioral norms that are typical for human interaction.” And, yep, unlike computer-based intelligent tutoring systems, they have actual bodies.

Robots potentially have two big advantages over other forms of ed tech, van den Berghe et al. note. One is that they allow learners to interact with a real-life environment (and not just a computer screen). The second is that they allow for more natural interaction than do other forms of tech because the robots are often “humanoid or in the shape of an animal.”

So, what does the current research say about what these robots mean for language learning?

Read the full article about language teaching robots by Frederick Hess at Education Next.