An Animated Pedagogical Agent on a CALL System Lecturing about the English Present Perfect Tense to Brazilian Students

Abstract

Animated Pedagogical Agents (APAs) may be used to help students in the process of learning a foreign language in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) by, for instance, pointing at specific areas of content to direct attention. Previous work has analyzed APAs in CALL systems, but results were contradictory and inconclusive regarding to whether APAs help students perform better or not. Additionally, none of the studies we have found studied APAs in CALL systems lecturing about the English present perfect tense, which is considered one of the main issues Brazilian students face when learning English as a foreign language. This paper describes the design, implementation and analysis of an APA integrated to a CALL system to help Brazilian students of English as a foreign language learn the present perfect tense. Thirty-nine Brazilian undergraduate students were randomly assigned to control and experimental groups, to evaluate whether the addition of an APA with features like talking, moving and pointing helps students improve performance. Pretest and posttest results were evaluated using statistical tests, which showed a significant increase in performance of students who interacted with the agent, when compared to correspondent outcomes of students in the control group.