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Top1. Introduction
Globalization enables strong collaborations between corporations and entrepreneurs from all over the world. As a result, for example also in Japan, more and more potential professions in a foreign language-speaking environment are being provided with fierce competition, contributing to Japan's growing need for foreign language learning. On the other hand, Japan has recently accepted a growing number of foreigners who wish to learn Japanese for a variety of reasons, including their employment, linguistic preference, or to live in Japan. Hence, there potentially exists mutual benefits for Japanese people and visiting foreigners: Japanese people can learn foreign languages from the visiting foreigners, and foreigners can learn Japanese from Japanese people. They should exchange language information and abilities, and we should provide opportunities for them to engage.
Such bidirectional exchanges, on the other hand, are rare; language learning (teaching) is often done in a one-way manner. Taking the example of a foreigner who works as a lecturer at a language school, the foreigner teaches Japanese students in his or her own language. He/she, on the other hand, is enrolled in a Japanese language school in order to learn the language. These tasks are accomplished one at a time and in a single direction, as described previously. To the best of our knowledge, no attempts have been made to meet both needs at the same time.
Therefore, we have been researching a method of “simultaneous second language acquisition” in order to improve the mutual benefits of locals and visitors by boosting the efficiency with which their second languages are learned simultaneously. It is the term “simultaneous second language acquisition” that refers to the learner's acquisition of another language in a sociolinguistic environment while also learning their first language, also known as their mother tongue, at the same time (Mushi, S., 2002). This phrase, on the other hand, is employed in this work in the context of people speaking distinct first languages who are simultaneously learning their second languages through their conversation with one another.
To acquire a second language, we have to master four skills, i.e., speaking, listening, reading and writing. Within them, this study focuses on simultaneous acquirement of the speaking skill during the conversation between Japanese and foreign students.
The remainder of this work is arranged in the following manner. Related works on second language acquisition, collaborative learning, and assessment of second language speaking proficiency are described in Section 2. Section 3 provides a dual-role collaborative learning model with dual-lingual communication, as well as our approach to attain simultaneous second language acquisition using the model. Section 4 depicts the BiTak CSCL system, which promotes the simultaneous development of second language speaking skills. Section 5 presents BiTak system experiments and examines the utility of our suggested technique. Section 6 concludes this paper.