Grading for Growth: Using Sliding Scale Rubrics to Motivate Struggling Learners

Using Virtual Agents to Deliver Lessons in Reading Comprehension to Struggling Adult Learners

The Center for the Study of Adult Literacy (CSAL) seeks to improve our understanding of ways to advance the reading skills of adult learners. Our web-based instructional tutor uses trialogues in the AutoTutor framework to deliver lessons in reading comprehension. We have found a way to manipulate proven comprehension strategies to fit the daily tasks of approaching the written word. With the ad...

Embodied Conversational Agent to Motivate Learners towards Communication in English

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 focus on the dialogue management aspects of our approac...

How to Motivate English Learners Faced with Psychological Burden

The misleading assumptions of Indonesian-speaking learners of English on the nature of English results in psychological burden inhibiting the process of teaching and learning. The assumptions should be eliminated at the beginning of English class. Besides, the instructor should extensively motivate and encourage the learners to maximize their potentials in learning process. Such approach will g...

Automatically grading learners' English using a Gaussian process

There is a high demand around the world for the learning of English as a second language. Correspondingly, there is a need to assess the proficiency level of learners both during their studies and for formal qualifications. A number of automatic methods have been proposed to help meet this demand with varying degrees of success. This paper considers the automatic assessment of spoken English pr...

Automatically Grading Learners’ English using a Deep Gaussian Process