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To improve oral English ability, in addition to learners’ willingness to practice more, the learning effect will be more obvious if tutor assistance is provided and can involve one-on-one individual tutoring. However, due to the scarcity of English teacher manpower, teachers cannot take care of every student in class, nor can they teach students one by one after class. Robot-Assisted English Speaking may provide a feasible solution. Therefore, this research has developed an educational robot system that can support individual tutoring of English speaking after class. It is called “English Oral Training Robot Tutor System (EOTRTS)”, which can actively lead students to learn through robots, and help students improve their oral English practice through individual tutoring and interactive methods. The implementation of this system is to use the social robot NAO’s voice recognition, QR code scanning, humanized limbs, and various sensor functions as well as the ability to interact with people and other features to help students learn oral English after class. The experimental results show that, in addition to a slightly lower satisfaction with the robot’s gesture performance, the students’ acceptance of the EOTRTS system is promising.

Educational robots have become popular and mature in lots of Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) applications in recent years. This paper reports the development of an English Teaching Assistant Robot (ETAR) and its effects on in-class English learning motivation for the first-year university students in Taiwan. The study uses the social robot NAO, with voice and interactive functions, as a classroom assistant to help teachers to train students’ spoken English in the classroom, including single-word and text reading aloud practice, sing-a-song as well as rollcall in class. After a six-week experiment, the results show that the introduction of the ETAR to the freshman English class improved students’ English learning motivation. Moreover, the teachers’ burden of some fixed mechanical work such as rollcall, word pronunciation, and text reading aloud practice can be reduced, and then teachers can have more energy to take care of more low learning-achievement students.

This paper shows the functionality of an online web-based system to facilitate English collocation learning via videos along with their captions. As videos can be attractive and fun materials for L2 learners who are learning English as a foreign language, this system is hopefully able to support them to be exposed to collocations by watching videos especially in terms of drama types. After recognizing collocations used in drama videos, L2 learners can look for further explanations and instances via an online concordancer integrated into this learning system. There were also functions including knowledge sharing, online assessment, and learning portfolio. In order to detect the usefulness and usability of the proposed system, we initially identified a small sum of the users’ perception as a pilot test. This preliminary result exhibited that these participants agreed the proposed system could help them learn English collocations.

Although scholars of extensive reading and vocabulary pedagogy confirm that the two research fields have a strong connection to improve one’s language competence, little seems to be implemented on students who are studying English as a foreign language (EFL) in the reading courses. This paper, first, used a case study in an EFL university context such as Taiwan to show that there is a need to examine the facts behind the deficient training of extensive reading. We then proposed a possible solution via some help of technology and created a mobile reading system. During the system implementation period, we observed one selected subject who might not be seen as an active or motivated EFL learner in reading classrooms and had a very low level of English proficiency, but our preliminary finding shows that his vocabulary ability can be enhanced because of the extensive reading opportunities guided by the system. Suggestions and future development of the system are finally indicated.

Although research into peer review claimed some convenience and benefits of executing online or computer-mediated-communication peer revisions in writing courses, few of them mentioned the control of the peer reviewing process via the help of technology. This paper depicts a possibility of creating a controlling online system on the one hand, and the process of executing it on the other. Using the subjects who were studying English as a foreign language, the preliminary study has shown some merits but raised some precautions of conducting this system for future studies.