Exploring the Viability of Representing Time and Order Adverbs through the Co-verbal Gestures of Social Robots in Teaching Reading Persian for Medical Purposes

This corpus-based study using sequential explanatory design in two quantitative and qualitative phases endeavored to explore the applicability of co-verbal gestures in teaching and learning Persian for Medical Purposes (PMP). After conducting a pilot study, a corpus of co-verbal gestures was reached. Nineteen frequent gestures of place that conceptualize the adverbs of time and order were extracted manually from the corpus to be employed in the collective practice with (human or robot) partners. In so doing, in three sequential semesters of the academic years 2020-2021, 240 undergraduate non-Iranian students of medical sciences were selected through the design of experiments and were randomly divided into three groups to practice PMP reading materials in dyads. After conducting a survey before and during the study, the participants were taught and assessed formatively in 18 sessions of the flipped classrooms. Assessing the participants' performance in the fields and carrying out a focus-group interview set the scenes for a complementarity study. The descriptive and inferential analyses of the collected data highlighted the applicability of social robots in enhancing the participants' PMP reading comprehension. The participants' active engagement in dyads confirmed the applicability of social robots in teaching and learning PMP reading comprehension skills.