Week 9 Reading - Designing chatbot interfaces for language learning: Ethnographic research into affect and users' experiences

My reading for this week was Yifei Wang’s 2008 MA thesis “Designing chatbot interfaces for language learning: Ethnographic research into affect and users' experiences” completed at UBC.

The first thing that stopped me was the use of “affect” in the title. The difference between affect and effect is one of those things I have had to check up on several times over the years; though I’m pretty sure of the difference, I still check occasionally out of curiosity. See here for a simple explanation.

Simply put, Yifei’s thesis is looking at how the design features of a particular chatbot engaged students on an emotional level and how this facilitated their learning. The topic is fascinating in that it looks at the area of artificial intelligence and how people can form an emotional relationship with interactive software! YiFei also makes mention of how this kind of technology might free language teachers from being “emotional laborers” (p. 3).   

Surprises

One of the surprises for me was that YiFei became interested in this field from her experience of working as a language teacher in Beijing in around 2003 and that chatbot software was even available in education back then! There are few other surprises within the sections of the thesis I read; it has the structure one would expect, taking the reader through the rationale, purpose, research problems, research questions, a literature review, and the research methods. However, I was a little confused by some of the citations where I was unsure if what was being used was a direct quotation or a paraphrase of the original. Most of the surprises for were in the appendices. I was particularly interested in the recruitment document (p. 151) that YiFei used to attract participants; this must be a particularly challenging part of doing ethnographic research. YiFei tells us that some of the participants quit from the study after some time (p. 9). It must be so difficult to collect data when this can happen at any time during our research. I was also interested in the Ethics Board Certificates of Approval (pp. 154-55). These give some insight into what a researcher has to do as part of getting approval from an ethics committee.

Three Takeaways

One idea that I took away to bring to my own research was to look back at my own experience as a teacher and to see what connections I can make to what I am investigating. It would be quite easy to not see some of these connections without really reflecting on all of the influences that affected my teaching and on what I learned along my journey.

 Another thing I found useful was the distinction between methodology and method mentioned on page 48. These terms are still somewhat confusing to me but the explanation that “that methodology involves the whole process of research, while a method is only an approach or technique to collect data” is a short and simple explanation that I found helpful.

Lastly, in the Ethics Board Certificates of Approval, I noticed that YiFei received funding from the “Hampton Research Endowment Fund”; I would like to find out more about getting funding for a research project as this could be of great benefit in the future.