Approaches to Chatbot Design for Teaching English to Maritime Students: Needs Analysis and Content Planning

Abstract

The article focuses on the research and technical requirement stage of collaborative inter-university project on design and development of a chatbot for learning Maritime English and integrating it into a comprehensive Maritime English ESP course. The paper aims to describe major approaches to designing a chatbot and provides a literature review on the approaches to selecting content of "Maritime English" ESP course based on the qualitative analysis of maritime student/cadet needs. An analytical review of existing mobile applications for learning English is given, the criteria for the selection of content components and determining basic functionality of chatbots for learning maritime English are formulated.