Innovation in Language Learning

In the last couple of years, Artificial Intelligence has rapidly entered every dimension of instruction and education, including language learning and teaching.

Chatbots and AI-powered tools can deeply change the way language teachers plan, implement and assess teaching pathways in a foreign language: they can really help conceive new worlds and new horizons (Fe-Fei, 2023).

Chatbots can act as artificial scaffolding for language learners, guiding them towards progression, thanks to the different advanced functions, such as text-to-speech, voice recognition, automatic feedback, grammar check, feedback on pronunciation and accuracy, etc.

The presentation will illustrate the ongoing research at the University for foreigners of Perugia, Italy, led by the author and related to the planning, training, and development of a chatbot for Italian as a second/foreign language, named AIDI (Learning and Dialogue in Italian). It is a Large Language Model specifically conceived by a research group at the University for Foreigners of Perugia, in cooperation with IUL University, intending to help international students familiarize themselves with the Italian language and culture before coming to study on the Italian campus, or as an e-learning or blended learning experience (Cinganotto, Montanucci, 2024).

The training and validation system of the different prompts will be highlighted, referring to the Italian Language Profile (Spinelli, Parizzi, 2010) and to the Syllabi of the University for Foreigners of Perugia related to the Italian language.

The different functions of the chatbot will be presented and shown, even if the validation process is already ongoing and preliminary experimentations are being carried out with different samples of learners. In particular, the following functions will be illustrated: 

-        Interactional scenarios (simulated learning scenarios to foster online, written, and oral interactions between the learner and AIDI)

-        Automatic feedback on written production and automatic translation from Italian into English

-        Interaction with learning material and faculty content to make more rapid access to information

-        Visual literacy through the description of images and pictures

-        Guide to the campus, to prepare international students for the different aspects of the residential campus, before coming to Italy.

The preliminary results of this ongoing research will be presented, showing the benefits and the potential of chatbots and Large Language Models to empower language teaching and learning, with particular reference to Italian as a second/foreign language.