Chatbot technology as a means of forming foreign language grammatical competence in self-study

Importance. The necessity for greater personalization of learning is a significant feature of foreign language teaching for an adult audience. This need is due to the individual experience of adult learners, narrower learning needs and limited time resources. One of the ways to build individual trajectories is the technology of an automated chatbot, which can be implemented on the basis of the Telegram messenger.The purpose of the study is to determine the effectiveness of this method for the development of the grammatical competence of adult learners.Materials and methods. Experimental methods were used with statistical processing of quantitative data, as well as questionnaires to collect qualitative data. The material of the study was the answers of the study participants, collected as part of the introductory and exit testing of grammatical skills in self-study.Results and Discussion. The bot was tested on a group of 29 A2-B1 students who scored an average of 61,11 % correct on the pretest. After three weeks of using the bot, the average percentage of correct answers on the post-test of the group reached 72,22 %. The results were statistically significant (p = 0,003) and confirmed the effectiveness of the bot as a tool for improving grammatical competence.Conclusion. The use of a chatbot has shown to be effective in developing the grammatical competence of adult learners. The data obtained can serve as a basis for the further development of similar tools aimed at developing a wider range of skills and abilities – lexical competence, listening or reading.

artificial intelligence, natural language processing, computational linguistics, chat-bot, self-study