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The addition of animated pedagogical agents (APAs) in computer-assisted learning (CAL) systems could successfully enhance students' learning motivation and engagement in learning activities. Conventionally, the APA incorporated multimedia materials are constructed through the cooperation of teachers and software programmers. However, the thinking and technical gap between two roles, a concept/content provider (teacher) and an implementer (software programmer), may lead to the concept distortion and loss in the final teaching material implementations. This often results in preventing a teacher from preparing his or her own APA-based multimedia learning systems. This study aims to develop a courseware to facilitate the CAL through the combination of the two roles into a single one and then teachers can use it freely by themselves. The courseware can help teachers to develop appropriate multimedia instructional materials incorporating APAs, which attracts students' attention and enhances their interest in learning. Furthermore, in this study two separate trial experiments were conducted to measure the teachers' satisfaction with the courseware and students' learning motivation after using APA-based multimedia learning systems. The results show that the participating teachers were satisfied with the courseware and would like to apply it in their instruction. Moreover, the participating students were strongly motivated by the customized APA-based multimedia learning systems. Therefore, the proposed courseware could give teachers a good opportunity to add pedagogical value to the curriculum, so that students' learning interest and motivation could be enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Animated agents are virtual characters who demonstrate facial expressions, gestures, movements, and speech to facilitate students’ engagement in the learning environment. Our research developed a courseware that supports a XML-based markup language and an authoring tool for teachers to script animated pedagogical agents in teaching materials. The design of the markup language refers to Mayer's segmenting principle that is efficient for assisting a teacher to edit teaching contents into a set of segments and further organize the segments in a given lesson in class. This paper details a case study of applying the proposed courseware for elementary students in English education, and further investigates how the instructional materials scripted using the courseware affect the learning achievement of students. Two groups of participants from an elementary school in Taiwan enrolled in this experiment. The experimental group used animated agent-based instructional materials in their English classroom, whereas the control group participated in a traditional curriculum. Post-test results revealed that the experimental group outperformed the control group. Our experiment demonstrated that the developed courseware provides an opportunity for scripting animated pedagogical agents as appropriate instructional tools in a computer-assisted language learning environment to foster elementary students’ English learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The degree of collocational knowledge influences learners' competence in the production of L2 speech and text. However, collocation learning is complex because learners might co-produce words incorrectly according to L1 inference. This study aims at the design of an online video-assisted collocation learning system, VACLS, that integrated video captioning and concordancing to foster collocational knowledge acquisition. English collocations with three patterns, namely verb–noun, verb–adverb, and verb–preposition, were selected as target collocations in VACLS. While learning with VACLS, the learners are able to watch videos with full captions and then looked for additional knowledge and instances of the target collocations via an online concordancer incorporated in VACLS. Besides the development of VACLS, effectiveness of the system and learners' perception were also evaluated. 20 university EFL students in Taiwan enrolled the experiment. After 3 weeks of learning with the aid of VACLS, the learning outcome for collocation retention was significant and the participants with less initial collocational knowledge exhibited greater improvement in collocation retention after learning VACLS. Besides, these learners highly agreed VACLS is helpful for English collocation acquisition. Thus the VACLS can be useful for English educators and EFL/ESL learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]