Employing Humanoid Robots for Teaching request speech act to Iranian young EFL learners

This study explores the effect of RALL (robot assisted language learning) on pragmatic instruction of request speech act to young EFL learners in Tehran, Iran. 20 preschool female and male EFL kids at the age of 3 to 6 were assigned to the RALL (10 students) and game-based (10 students) groups and a pre-test was given in order to homogenize the students based on their request making knowledge in English. The materials used were the Functional Communication in English (Tajeddin, Alemi, 2014) and also ESL library website scenarios through which the request sentences were extracted for both teaching and testing. In addition, in the RALL group (experimental) the robot was utilized as an assistant to the teacher while for the game-based group (control) the instruction was based on a gaming method in teaching request sentences. The instructional sessions for both groups took eight sessions in which the RALL group took 8 hours while the non-RALL group took 32 hours. After the instructions, the investigators administered a post-test for both groups which were analyzed using independent sample t-test. The result of the t-test indicated that there was a significant difference between RALL and game-based groups in their mean scores of request making sentences. In addition, the instructor reported a positive attitude of kids towards RALL in learning the request speech act. Finally, the result proved that employing a humanoid robot can be of a great advantage in teaching speech act of request to preschoolers which should be considered as a novel method for EFL kids.