Literacy learning — learning how to read and write — begins long before children enter school. One of the key skills to reading and writing is the ability to represent thoughts symbolically and share them in language with an audience who may not necessarily share the same temporal and spatial context. Children learn and practice these important language skills everyday, telling stories with the...

In this paper, we present Sam, an embodied conversational storyteller who tells stories interactively with children. Sam was designed to appear as a peer to preschool children, but to tell stories in a developmentally advanced way in order to model narrative skills important for literacy. Literacy learning learning how to read and write, begins long before children enter school. One of the key ...

The crucial role of affective factors like anxiety, inhibition, motivation and self-esteem have long been of interest in the field of language learning due to their enormous association with the cognitive processes involved in performance in a second or foreign language. This study aimed at investigating the relationship between Iranian EFL learners’ self-esteem and conversational dominance in ...