Will ChatBots become a main form of English conversation practice?

I am curious how natural this conversation can be, and how accurate or useful the speech recognition software is. I want to try it.

The obvious advantage is the cost, and 1500yen per month is quite affordable, so I can see it catching on.

I suppose this method has a lot of potential for routine conversations as AI develops.

However, will the program push the speaker to develop communication strategies such as asking for a repetition, paraphrasing, asking for an example etc.? If not, the speaker will not really be developing communication skills that will be useful when speaking with real humans from other cultures and language backgrounds.

The first ICU Global Leadership Studies' "Leadership English Module"

Today was the last day of the first ever GLS program at ICU and I finished my job as instructor/coordinator of the month-long Leadership English component with a strong sense of fulfillment thanks to the dedicated efforts of the director Dr. Pogosyan, his staff, and my fellow instructors and coaches, and the "fellows" (participants) themselves. The fellows were 24 mid-career professionals from leading corporations in Japan such as Sony, IBM and Honda and two non-Japanese graduate students studying at ICU. It was a great pleasure working in this program and I am glad that I signed up to do it even though it kept me busy for a month of our summer term. I hope I will have a chance to do it again next year.

For details of the program as a whole, see: http://subsite.icu.ac.jp/gls/index.html

The Leadership English component was designed to help the students activate the English that they already know and use their voice, body, and vocabulary with impact, professionalism, and persuasiveness in discussions, debates, negotiations, and presentations. We were glad to hear that the English component was well-received based on the evaluations that were collected by the GLS office. Although most of the participants were using English fairly regularly in their work, many had never had a chance to practice or receive formal training/feedback in how to lead discussions/debates, exchange opinions critically but politely, or make presentations with effective visuals, use of voice/body and phrases such as those for facilitating Q&A.

For next year, I have several ideas for improving the program further. These include:

1) Making a "Learning Record" for each participant that records key information such as the student's goals, the instructors' assessment of English level etc., performance on key assignments such as presentations, individual coaching records, and feedback comments from peers and instructors for future improvement. This year a number of documents and channels were used to keep track of the above information, but ideally all information about one participant should be consolidated in an organized way. For example, English instructors were taking notes on presentation rehearsals and giving advice to participants orally based our notes, but that often left no record for the participant to refer to later except in their memory or quick shorthand notes that they took. To make this work, I envision all instructors and coaches having access to one online file (a shared Google Document, for example) or profile for each participant, and inputting information electronically on the spot in the class as we watch a presentation or observe a negotiation or debate.

2) Teaching and demanding evidence based arguments with focus, organization, and documentation in their final presentations. The presentations this year were full of creative ideas, and the presentation skills of the participants improved a good measure each week, but the content of the final assignment, the proposals for how to kick start Japan, failed to be persuasive and would not be acceptable as a proposal in business, as Mr. Kitashiro, current chairman of board of trustees of ICU and former president and board chair of IBM Japan, aptly pointed out in his final comments. His words have the most weight as an extremely experienced global business leader, and I'm glad he said this openly and frankly because it was what most of the audience members (and possibly the presenters themselves) were thinking, and I know I felt it. Next year, I hope there will be more coordination among the program planners, instructors and coaches to design a process of building final presentations that will be much more persuasive. We need to treat the final presentation just like a college assignment, give written criteria, give library research time, give feedback along the milestones of outline, draft, rehearsal, and design a schedule that can allow the teams to meet with English instructors or coaches or professors to get necessary feedback.

I think those two changes are the highest priorities and will have the biggest impact in terms of the satisfaction of the participants.

Some other small ones may include: 1) Setting a minimum TOEIC score to exclude students who may not have enough basic English ability to benefit from the program, 2) requiring the Learning Summary from all students as a completion requirement (and making a system that allows comments on the postings), 3) putting more learning materials for English such as handouts and recordings online so that the participants can preview and review the materials, and 4) attracting more non-Japanese participants--Thi and Nathalie were invaluable additions to the program. I'm sure more ideas will come out when we have the program evaluation meeting to look back at what we did and the comments that the participants gave us.

Also, I hope there will be an official series of events for GLS graduates and their colleagues to have regular follow-up training sessions on key skills that they want to keep improving such as debate, presentations, negotiations, reading/discussing business ideas and case studies etc. Perhaps something can be done in a downtown location once a month for those who are interested?
Looking forward to it.