Intelligent agents in teaching foreign languages: typology, opportunities, challenges
Authors:   Lomonosov Moscow State University, Titova Svetlana V. , Temuryan Kristina T. ,   Lomonosov Moscow State University
Published: December 2024

Since artificial intelligence first appeared in the 1950s, the interest towards it has been changing throughout its existence, but in a number of countries, including Russia, there is currently an increase in the government’s interest in artificial intelligence technologies that have found application in various fields, such as finance, medicine and education.
The use of artificial intelligence in teaching executes functions such as, for instance, natural language generation, personalisation of learning and proctoring. At the same time, besides the organisation of the educational process or the design of learning materials, artificial intelligence technologies in teaching also include teaching a foreign language or learning it. Due to the simplification of the process of creating such technologies, which currently, due to the development of tools for their development, does not require the same training as before, dialogue-based сomputer-assisted language learning plays a significant role in the use of artificial intelligence technologies in teaching foreign languages.
Dialogue-based сomputer-assisted language learning provides students with the opportunity to develop and form foreign language skills through interaction with a conversational agent or a bot, which are also often referred to as social interactive agents and are defined as agents capable of independently communicating with people and with each other in a socially reasonable way via multimodal behaviours. Chatbots are a category of conversational agents, which, in turn, are a separate class of dialogue systems.The attention of researchers is currently paid to the implementation of intelligent
agents in foreign language teaching and overcoming the difficulties associated with it.
The purpose of the article is to provide a theoretical review of publications devoted to the issues of foreign language teaching through the use of interactive dialogue systems or conversational agents; to classify the intelligent agents currently used in foreign language teaching in accordance with the criteria proposed earlier; to describe the accumulated experience of introducing intelligent agents into foreign language teaching, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of using certain bots in specific situations; to identify the didactic potential of chatbots as a type of conversational agents based on AI technologies; the features of integrating chatbots into the process of developing the students’ oral-speech and written-speech skills, as well as skills of interaction.
The works of Russian and foreign authors published over the past 5 years devoted to the study of artificial intelligence technologies in foreign language teaching were selected for the analysis. The research methods are the analysis of research literature and classification.
In the course of the research, notions such as “conversational agents” and “chatbots” were defined and the history of their development from the second half of the 20th century to the present day was described. Based on the works of researchers, the criteria were selected for the classification of intellectual agents currently used in teaching foreign languages, on the basis of which their typology was proposed. Finally, the results of the studies describing attempts to introduce such systems into the foreign language teaching process were studied, as a result of which their advantages and disadvantages were described, establishing the prospects for further research on the issue.