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<Paper uid="W05-0213">
  <Title>Situational language training for hotel receptionists</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="90" end_page="91" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Conclusion: lessons learned
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In general, we found that the creation of content for a Thetis like type of concept was not a trivial and easy task. Indeed Thetis provides a solution that is strongly web oriented in the sense that it insists on interaction on the web, personalization and information access. As a consequence the type of content that fits these requirements is radically different from ones that already exist for other supports such as, for instance, CD-ROMs. We did not expect this adaptation to be so time consuming. It turns out that while a &amp;quot;traditional&amp;quot; type of CD-ROM content can be integrated in the form of exercises within the Thetis solution, it is necessary to build new types of content in the form of scenarios.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Indeed the notion of a scenario, which is central to Thetis as well as its strong point, means one that covers both learning a language and learning a work practice. This scenario should also be attractive and evolving enough so that it retains students' interest and motivation. The borderline is sometimes difficult: we need to be careful not only to propose games where students learn how to do their work but not so much how to speak a language. Moreover, the scenarios, since they take place on the web and in a virtual world, cannot be like the ones that are proposed in a face to face course. Interaction is different. Robots plays a central role in pushing people to interact with each other, and so does the tutor. How to make the best pedagogical use of these two aspects? What is the type of dialogues that work better in terms of pedagogical purposes? During the testing we had had various comments on the specific features offered by the system as well as suggestions for improving it; all of them would need to be further tested. These suggestions  come from different perspectives: from the tutors and from the students.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> As far as the tutors are concerned, while they find the idea really interesting pedagogically, they also generally consider it difficult to interact with several students at the same time. For instance correcting several students in the chat is almost impossible. Therefore they ask for tools to help them in this process. These tools would be like the ones that already exist in current management systems courses, and they would have to be enriched with some specific functions to deal with on-line interaction. Teachers usually liked a lot the language guesser module as it forces students to interact in the language they learn and relieve them from checking that students do not interact in their own language.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> On the opposite side, the students liked and used a lot the contextual on-line dictionary because they really want to play and interact and are forced to do so in the foreign language. The students definitively liked the virtual reality and the game aspect. The strongest point of Thetis is undoubtedly the interactions based on a virtual reality scenario as compared to e-mail interactions, chats or forums.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Probably owing to the virtual world shy people tend to participate much more than usual. This is also the feedback that we got from tutors concerning their students.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> While students enjoyed the game very much, this would need to be tested on the long run as Thetis certainly benefits from the &amp;quot;novelty effect&amp;quot;. Both teachers and students would like to be able to speak rather than just to write. However, it is not clear how this type of interaction would be possible in virtual reality with 15 people not being able to see each other. During the project, we identified strong points as well as difficulties and gaps. The main difficulty is in the type of content that fits Thetis' philosophy. Indeed, building such content requires more time than we first expected. While part of the content can be just repurposed and localized from already existing materials, a completely new type of content needs also to be created from scratch. Users made interesting suggestions regarding the integration of new technologies such as speech processing or tools for the tutors. These would require further testing.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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