Exploring the Viability of Representing Time and Order Adverbs through the Co-verbal Gestures of Social Robots in Teaching Reading Persian for Medical Purposes

This corpus-based study using sequential explanatory design in two quantitative and qualitative phases endeavored to explore the applicability of co-verbal gestures in teaching and learning Persian for Medical Purposes (PMP). After conducting a pilot study, a corpus of co-verbal gestures was reached. Nineteen frequent gestures of place that conceptualize the adverbs of time and order were extracted manually from the corpus to be employed in the collective practice with (human or robot) partners. In so doing, in three sequential semesters of the academic years 2020-2021, 240 undergraduate non-Iranian students of medical sciences were selected through the design of experiments and were randomly divided into three groups to practice PMP reading materials in dyads. After conducting a survey before and during the study, the participants were taught and assessed formatively in 18 sessions of the flipped classrooms. Assessing the participants' performance in the fields and carrying out a focus-group interview set the scenes for a complementarity study. The descriptive and inferential analyses of the collected data highlighted the applicability of social robots in enhancing the participants' PMP reading comprehension. The participants' active engagement in dyads confirmed the applicability of social robots in teaching and learning PMP reading comprehension skills.
Extended Abstract:
Parallel with the rapid expansion of state-of-the-art educational technology or Ed Tech-assisted approaches in the everyday lives of Digital Natives, college reading comprehension skills have become a digital engagement. Although solutions on how to employ Ed Tech-aided language teaching and learning may vary, as an extensive reading program, the purpose of flipped language classrooms is to give students the opportunity for collaboration to enhance their learning and comprehension wherein incorporation of Ed Tech tools (e.g., new generations of games, social robots, etc.) into language education allows for one-to-one and tailored language education. This approach enhances the organization of the language learning process mainly through the use of pre-, while, and post-classroom activities and the convergence of students' engagement, interactive communications and life experiences. This complementarity study, using the self-explanatory design in two quantitative and qualitative phases, endeavored to make use of the affordances offered by co-verbal gestures in the collective process of time and order adverbs as conceptual metaphors in the flipped classrooms of Persian for Medical Purposes (PMP) reading comprehension. This way, corpora of the most frequent gestures and PMP reading materials were formed through conducting a pilot study. Two-hundred and forty participants were selected from among 308 non-Iranian students (Arab = 171, Turk = 10, Urdu = 28, Kashmiri = 31) of nursing (N = 95), midwifery (N = 36), operation room (N = 41), anesthesia (N = 39), and medicine (N = 98) using the design of experiments in the confidence level of 99% and margin errors of 1%. They took PMP as an obligatory two-credit course in the spring and fall semesters of the academic years 2020-2021 under the Covid-19 pandemic. After assessing the participants' Persian reading proficiency levels, they were randomly divided into three groups (human-human; robot-human; human-robot) to learn PMP reading skills in the post-comprehension flipped classroom in dyads. In so doing, the data were gathered in two quantitative and qualitative phases through a researcher-made survey, formative assessment of the participants in both instructional-learning and professional contexts (viz., healthcare fields), and a focus-group interview. Initially, the participants were taught and assessed in the online classrooms by the subject-area and language teachers (viz., adjunct teaching) through NAVID learning management system. Then, they were summoned up to practice PMP reading materials with their fellow students or a social robot, as their counterparts, in dyads using co-verbal gestures of hands and face in telepresence. To be more precise, in the post-comprehension flipped classrooms, a collective course was developed through NAVID in which students have interactions with each other or social robot to practice reading the PMP materials through co-verbal gestures. Eighteeen online (teaching and assessment) sessions were accompanied by eighteen post-comprehension practice sessions. Finally, to debrief the participants perception of the course, the participants with the lowest and highest scores were invited to take part in a focus-group interview. While the gathered data in the quantitative phase was analyzed both descriptively and inferentially through a Wilcoxon signed-rank test and repeated measures ANOVA, the qualitative data were analyzed through the theme-based analysis of the selected participants' answers to the focus-group interview's prompts. Results revealed the early reports of positive impressions of reading PMP using co-verbal gestures and collective attempt for learning PMP reading materials. It was found that co-verbal gestures for reading the abstract concepts of adverbs of time and order supported students' PMP comprehension and performance. Findings also revealed that, PMP reading through the co-verbal gestures developed the participants' learning experience. On the other hand, the engagement that the teleoperated robot created in elaborating the abstract concepts of the adverbs in the PMP reading materials led to student outperformance in both instructional-learning contexts and healthcare fields. In the meantime, students were pushing the needle toward collective engagement. Likewise, the results revealed that student interaction with social robots (viz., human-robot) in doing post-comprehension activities led to significant differences in the participants' comprehension and performance, as compared with human-human or robot-human interaction in dyads. The differences indicate that why human-robot interaction for illuminating the abstract concepts of the adverbs of time and order in the PMP reading are hypothesized to be better than human-human co-verbal gestures in aiding learning and comprehension. The human-robot interaction for reading the PMP materials increased the participants' agency and the participants doubled down on the collective engagement with robots in the flipped classrooms. This study could have implications for integrating Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics (STEAM) approach into teaching PMP reading comprehension.