An Integration of Fanfiction into the Clouds of Social Robots for Language for Medical Purposes Productive and Receptive Skills Education

Studies have shown that educational technology can promote college language learning and performance and provide higher education stakeholders with more efficient means for dealing with academic and professional needs. Today, higher education programs can only be successful with the use of new educational technology tools in the teaching and learning process, especially when there are special education requisites. In tandem, there is a dire need to review educational technology tools that have been applied to college language learning and teaching continuously and renovate former, current, and future activities. Social robots with human-like features have paved the way for students to interact with the actual academic and professional contexts, which is thought to be important for Language for Specific and Academic skills education and the use of content materials and skills in real-life arenas. Social robots continue to be present in language education by the new face of social telepresence robots. This way, social robots are readily combined with mobile devices (e.g., cellphones, tablets). Substantial research has focused on integrating students' academic and professional into the social telepresence robot-aided college language skills teaching and learning. Lingual and non-lingual features of social robots offer a wide array of possibilities for college language skills education in relation to real-world needs. Fanfiction in the robot-assisted language learning modules provides the possibility to practice and share the true-to-life experience. Meanwhile, the argument that social robots may improve the learning of Language for Specific and Academic Purposes has been corroborated by the annotated features of the new generation of games (e.g., augmented reality games). The new generation of games in college language education can represent the overlap among academic and healthcare field contexts. In this fashion, the use of educational and pedagogical games has fortified the college language teaching and learning process. The game has also spawned new forms of robot-aided language learning; thus, true instantiation of real-world phenomenon can be enhanced by the verbal (written and oral) clouds of the augmented reality games on the moulage body of social robots. While may not be fully realized today, the integration of artificial beings into human life and society can evoke great images of variegated constituents of the actual-world scenes. By the use of the annotated moulage body of social robots and fan fiction, under the Covid-19 pandemic, the study investigated how students view the use of the social robots and its putative impacts on learning Language for Medical Purposes productive (writing) and receptive (reading) skills education. In effect, in examining the impact of social robot augmented reality games on college language learning the aim was to if engaging in real-life-like world scenes and scenarios with fellow students, providing richer emergent language practice and learning. This complementarity study was conducted through parallel and self-explanatory sequential designs in the academic years 2020-2021 at Isfahan University of Medical Sciences through the national learning management system of NAVID and an embedded free software web conferencing system of BigBlueButton. NAVID was selected for the participants to interact and proceed with the social telepresence robots, providing a milieu for ubiquitous online discussion and teacher tutoring. This way, using the convenience sampling method and the design of experiments, 389 students of midwifery, nursing, operating room, radiology, and health information technology, who took the obligatory two-credit lesson of language for medical Purposes, were selected. Then, the participants took part in the general language proficiency tests (Persian Language Proficiency test = AMFA and Ministry of Health Language Exam = MHLE) and they were divided into the foursomes of teacher- and student-written groups. This 16-week study was started with soliciting the participants' attitude regarding college language skills learning through robots relying on their experience. In each instructional classroom, initially, the participants practiced writing and reading skills through reading the content materials (in Persian or English) and integrating them into the annotated clouds on the social telepresence robots' bodies. It is of note that the social telepresence robot augmented reality games and fanfictions were two types, namely teacher-written and student-written fanfictions to be uploaded as the written clouds of the activities. While, in the teacher-written fanfictions, the language and content teachers collaborated to write fan fiction, in the student-written fanfictions, students wrote the content of fictional writings with reliance on their academic and professional experiences. Then, they were taught and assessed individually by the collaboration of language and content teachers (co-teaching or adjunct teaching). In the middle of the course (the eighth session), once again, the participants' attitudes were solicited. The quantitative phase of the study was closed by assessing the participants' reading and writing skills in the healthcare fields through a mini-Clinical Evaluation Exercise (mini-CEX) in the process of addressing the standard patients' needs. Finally, the study was closed by conducting an online focus-group interview. While the gathered data in the quantitative phase was analyzed through the repeated measures ANOVA, the participants’ responses to the interview prompts were content analyzed through MAXQDA 2020. Overall, this study revealed that although there are currently few reported occurrences of receptive and productive activities integrating students' experiences and thoughts into social robot-aided modules, fan fiction is a new channel for introducing the students' experiences into the process of practicing medical college reading and writing through social telepresence robots. Reading the self-written (vs. teacher-written) fanfictions to be glossed into the clouds of the social telepresence robots increased students' participation and performance. The analysis of qualitative data indicated that the participants applied different strategies during the study. Most frequently cited were cognitive and support strategies with addressing the (academic and professional) need (e.g., adopting a proactive role, vicarious learning). Like so, the social telepresence robot augmented reality games, were real-life-like college language activities, allow for cooperative interaction in the context of college skills language teaching and learning, where entities can be boosted with each other. The participants also held favorable perceptions about sharing their experience through reading and writing fanfiction for practicing Language for Medical Purposes skills through the medium of telepresence robots. Based on the findings, academic and professional implications are provided.