Abstract This paper aims to provide an overview of the 2021 ChinaCALL conference. The topics range from traditional ones teaching, learning and assessment emerging fields intelligent computer-assisted language (iCALL), conversational agents development, reconceptualisation teacher digital literacy, reflections upon perfunctory gamification in particularly pedagogy post-pandemic era. In addition...

In this paper we present the work carried out to deeply study the nature of determiner errors in written Basque. The collected error examples have led us to a more exhaustive analysis which has been essential for the automatic detection of the exhibited phenomena. The analyzed and stored data are necessary for the development of a grammar checker for Basque and Intelligent Computer-Assisted Lan...

This paper presents IDAZKIDE, a prototype of an intelligent language learning environment (ICALL) for learners of Basque. The philosophy of the system is to make different Natural Language Processing tools simultaneously accessible to students to help them (mainly at the morphological level) to write in Basque, as well as to give advice, taking into account some characteristics of the student g...

Speech-enabled dialogue systems developed within an iCALL framework offer a potentially powerful tool for dealing with the challenges of teaching/learning an endangered language where learners have limited access to native speaker models of the language and limited exposure to the language in a truly communicative setting. This paper explores the major potential of virtual conversational agent ...

Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) systems should be used, in our opinion, with a double purpose: helping the user in his/her learning process and, helping in the research of Second Language Acquisition theories. These systems can be used in the study of special phenomena of Language Acquisition, such as fossilisation and learning strategies. Some work in this direction has...

Arabic is a Semitic language that is rich in its morphology and syntax. The very numerous and complex grammar rules of the language could be confusing even for Arabic native speakers. Many Arabic intelligent computerassisted language-learning (ICALL) systems have neither deep error analysis nor sophisticated error handling. In this paper, we report an attempt at developing an error analyzer and...

An online intelligent tutoring system "Azalea" demonstrated here is the first attempt of its kind in simulating a human teacher firstly by diagnosing free-format-based students' English translations, and then returning error contingent feedback with suggested corrections. We have designed this KE (knowledge engineer)-free-ICALL by exploiting a FSA (finite state automaton)-based template-system ...

This paper presents two new corpus-based studies of feedback in the domain of teaching Spanish as a foreign language, concentrating on the type and frequency of different feedback moves, as well as what happens in the moves that follow the feedback. In particular, as well as looking at positive feedback, it concentrates on two general kinds of negative feedback strategies: (1) Giving-Answer Str...

A common focus of systems in Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) is to provide immediate feedback to language learners working on exercises. Most of this research has focused on providing feedback on the form of the learner input. Foreign language practice and second language acquisition research, on the other hand, emphasizes the importance of exercises that require the lea...

Natural language processing (NLP) has long been used to automatically analyze language produced by language learners, typically aimed at providing individualized feedback and learner modeling in Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning systems (cf. Heift & Schulze 2007). While much interesting research has been reported, it is difficult to determine the state of the art for the automatic...