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Learn
about ROBO-SENSEI's unique features.
Take
a brief tour of the program before you start.
Learn
how ROBO-SENSEI can be used for grammar brush-up, during travel, or
to supplement a course.
Learn
how to best incorporate ROBO-SENSEI into your school's Japanese curriculum.
See
how each lesson in ROBO-SENSEI corresponds to topics taught in popular
Japanese textbooks.
Return
to ROBO-SENSEI home.
System
Requirements for ROBO-SENSEI.
ROBO-SENSEI
by Noriko Nagata, University of San Francisco
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TIPS
FOR TEACHERS
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ROBO-SENSEI lessons can be applied to language instruction in many ways, e.g., as classroom activities, as homework assignments, as review material for quizzes, as extra-credit work, and in distance learning courses. |
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ROBO-SENSEI as a Classroom Activity
You can conduct a ROBO-SENSEI lesson in the language lab, where you can assist the students and check on their progress as they work. ROBO-SENSEI provides immediate feedback so it is not strictly necessary for you to be present, but using the program in the language lab enables you to give specialized attention to individual students having difficulties—something that wouldn’t be practical with traditional classroom activities. Also, with traditional written homework, students are less interested in the topic by the time they receive written feedback, but using ROBO-SENSEI in the language lab provides all the students with immediate feedback while they are still interested in the topic. |
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ROBO-SENSEI as Writing Practice
After finishing a ROBO-SENSEI lesson, you can instruct students to open Microsoft® Word and to write one paragraph about the cultural topic they learned from the lesson. For example, after Noun Modifier Lesson 1 (Tokyo Tour), you can ask students to write about Tokyo, using the grammatical patterns and vocabulary they learned in the lesson as much as possible. (e.g.   ) Please tell students not to close the ROBO-SENSEI lesson, so they can look at the lesson while writing the paragraph. Since exercises are based on daily conversations, after finishing Noun Modifier Lesson 2 (Tokyo Tour), you can ask students to create a conversation starting with a question, "A:  ". |
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ROBO-SENSEI as Conversation Practice
After finishing a ROBO-SENSEI lesson, you can expand the activity to include oral conversation practice as well. For example, the students can ask each other about what the characters in the ROBO-SENSEI lesson did, and make comments or ask questions about the Japanese cultural points emphasized in the lesson. Since the vocabulary in each ROBO-SENSEI lesson appears repeatedly in the production exercises, the students will be automatically primed to use the constructions covered in the lesson without stumbling over vocabulary (a common problem in classroom discussion exercises). |
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ROBO-SENSEI as Homework
You can assign a ROBO-SENSEI lesson as homework. Since ROBO-SENSEI provides immediate, detailed feedback to students’ responses, the students can correct their errors on their own and practice with ROBO-SENSEI as much as they like. You can also save valuable time on homework correction. As a follow-up activity, you can ask the students to submit several printouts of the assigned exercises with their completed answers, or you can ask them to write a short summary about what they learned in the lesson. |
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ROBO-SENSEI as Quiz Preparation
The ROBO-SENSEI lessons are good review material for quizzes. Students who perform poorly on quizzes often do not know how to prepare for them (e.g., they look at the textbook or workbook section assigned for the quiz, but do not know how to practice it by themselves). ROBO-SENSEI lessons force students to work through the material before the quiz. They can try out their answers, discover their mistakes, receive detailed feedback, and practice until they are ready for the quiz. Eventually, students begin to internalize these deeper and more effective study skills. |
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ROBO-SENSEI as Extra Credit
Students sometimes ask for extra-credit work. However, it is not easy to find a useful and interesting assignment for extra credit, and such services necessarily detract from the time devoted to the rest of the class. A ROBO-SENSEI lesson can be a suitable extra-credit assignment—and you don’t have to spend any time correcting it. |
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ROBO-SENSEI and Technology Utilization
There are lots of low-tech packages around, but they tend to be authoring systems for producing canned multiple-choice exercises. This places a considerable burden on you, because it isn’t easy to learn the authoring system and to come up with plausible options in a good multiple-choice exercise. ROBO-SENSEI doesn’t require you to produce anything; it is self-contained, comprehensive, and complete. Furthermore, the canned, multiple-choice exercises produced by most authoring systems aren’t very interesting or productive for the students. They are perceived as an inferior substitute for real human instruction. In sharp contrast, the friendly interface and artificial intelligence technology in ROBO-SENSEI provide an attractive and welcome complement to human instruction. It is colorful, engaging, specific, immediate, and infinitely patient. So ROBO-SENSEI is a clearly superior way to integrate technology into the classroom. |
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ROBO-SENSEI and Distance Learning
ROBO-SENSEI is not a comprehensive distance learning course, but it is an essential component of any such course. The presentation of lessons and the administration of quizzes online are easy. The real bottleneck in distance learning is to provide interesting production exercises and feedback approximating those presented by a real teacher. One (expensive) solution is to have human teachers waiting online for various periods in the day to provide advice and to grade online exercises by hand. An inherent inefficiency of such an approach is that the human teacher has to give the same advice on hard problems over and over as different students encounter them at different times, whereas in a traditional course the hard exercises can be discussed just once. ROBO-SENSEI analyzes exercise responses automatically, immediately, and with infinite patience wherever and whenever it is called upon, so detailed production feedback is feasible without the need for a staff of instructors waiting online to repeatedly answer the same questions. |
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ROBO-SENSEI and Cultural Background
Each ROBO-SENSEI lesson provides substantial cultural information with colorful photos and relevant notes illustrating Japanese history, lifestyle, travel, and living. There is an emphasis on places students will likely visit and activities students will likely participate in during a casual visit to Japan. The cultural themes in ROBO-SENSEI can be interesting topics for further discussion in class and for writing a Japanese composition (using vocabulary the students are already well drilled on). |
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