ItsLEADR: Intelligent Tutoring System for Learning English Articles by Diagrammatic Reasoning

ItsLEADR is an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) designed to teach English as a Second Language (ESL) students and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students, how to properly use English articles. ESL/EFL students have difficulty understanding some English language rules in part because language is culturally derived and is therefore not easily explained. The English article system is an especially difficult concept to grasp for students whose native languages do not contain an article system, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. Yoshii first proposed a diagrammatic reasoning model for the selection of English articles which expressed that the intent of the sentence speaker dictated article usage. Then Yoshii and Milne developed a Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) system named DaRT which implemented the diagrammatic reasoning model. Next Bruck built an Intelligent Tutoring System, ITSLEA, which refined and expanded upon the functionality of DaRT. Our new system ItsLEADR adopts and expands on the previous ITSLEA system to provide more effective tutoring sessions to the students. ItsLEADR includes additions and modifications to the diagrammatic reasoning model, modifications to the pedagogical model, modifications to the misconception library, and addition of a predictability model, and implementation of a graphical user interface. This thesis describes the ItsLEADR design, development, and subsequent evaluation by ESL/EFL students.Computer Scienc