# Educational AI Chatbots for Content and Language Integrated Learning
## 1 Introduction  
In schools in developed countries, the traditional tutor-centered approach in which students are in a constant effort to keep up, retain information, and cope with the rapid pace of the modern educational process still dominates. However, such an approach cannot adequately address the challenges of the digital era, which requires special knowledge and skills from students and tutors to exploit the capabilities offered by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Therefore, tutors should use modern ICT tools to improve, and possibly optimize, the learning experience of their students.  
In this context, the use of trending technologies has a new, significant direction potential. An important emerging educational technology is based on conversational AI, implemented as so-called AI chatbots. AI chatbots are intelligent systems/applications that are able to interact with humans in various aspects of daily life using natural language (NL). They can be found mainly as personal assistants in business customer support. In the educational context, AI chatbots can play the role of intelligent tutors by presenting educational material, stimulating dialogue, providing feedback to students, etc. In some cases, AI chatbots can also play a complementary/supportive role to human tutors by answering students' questions and providing guidance in a 24/7 timespan, something that is evidently impossible or unprofitable to implement with human tutors.  
This paper reports on recent research related to the design, implementation, and evaluation of an educational AI chatbot, aiming to support the modern methodological learningapproach of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) [1], i.e., the simultaneous learning of both content (e.g., a cultural subject) and foreign languages (e.g., English and French). Specifically, in a CLIL approach, students are taught a specific subject in a foreign language instead of their mother tongue. Activities based on the CLIL method are mainly designed to allow language and content of a particular subject to be learned at the same time. More specifically, in this paper, a real use case of an educational AI chatbot called AsasaraBot is presented, which complements human tutors in teaching cultural content related to the subject of the Minoan Civilization, emphasizing the characteristic figurine of the Minoan Snake Goddess. The related chatbot-based educational program was evaluated in English and French as a foreign language at a public Lyceum and in two private language schools in Greece. Findings from the related experiments show that the use of AI chatbot technology for interactive ICT-based learning can effectively support the CLIL method for learning a foreign language and cultural subject at the same time. The AsasaraBot has been designed and implemented using free software, i.e., the Snatchbot platform.  
The contribution of the work presented in this paper is the following: it introduces AI Chatbot technology to support the modern learning method of CLIL, mainly playing the role of an ICT-based tutor and secondarily the role of an ICT-based assistant of a human tutor. The proposed approach has been implemented and evaluated in English and French as foreign languages for Greek students, reporting on the effectiveness and potential of the approach. To this end, an educational program has been specifically designed and implemented according to the needs of distance ICT-based learning, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  
The structure of this paper is as follows: Section 2 provides background knowledge regarding the utilized technology, i.e., AI chatbots. Section 3 describes the proposed approach, and Section 4 presents its evaluation in a real setting, i.e., in foreign language classes. Section 5 provides a discussion of the research issues and challenges of the chatbot-based educational approach. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper.