I wanna talk like you: Speaker adaptation to dialogue style in L2 practice conversation

Abstract

We present a novel method to analyse speaker alignment in second language practice dialogue. Our method represents utterances as Dialogue Acts and applies Epistemic Network Analysis to their use. ENA makes convergence between speakers visible, and enables us to confirm hypotheses that both initial similarity and final convergence increase with student ability; and that Dialogue Act use changes with ability, and over the course of an interaction. Our results can inform personalised automatic tutoring tools as well as formative assessment and feedback.