Seok-Hoon You (Korea University). 2000. K -buddy: A Near-spontaneous and an Interactive Program for Learners of Korean as a Foreign Language (자연대화방식을 이용한 음성인식기반 한국어 학습 프로그램). Language Information. Volume 4. 119-141.
This paper aims to introduce K -buddy, a world-first CALL (Computer Aided Language Learning) program with voice recognition and speech synthesis technology implemented. This program has excellent features such as sound user interface, high interactivity, spontaneity of conversation, learner-centeredness, user-friendliness, and user customizability that would help the learners to have his or her own practice sessions for the four major skills of language learning, i.e. reading, writing, speaking, and listening, in the comfortable and friendly environment.
Interactivity and spontaneity are two major key concepts of the program, that are borrowed from the field of language pedagogy. In order to guarantee an enhanced level of communicability competence of the language learners, various proposals have been made in the field so far. With the advent of new information and computer technologies in the internet era, numerous application programs have been developed so far to facilitate the learning of foreign languages. But none of them were quite successful in its level of interactivity and spontaneity not to mention communication competence. K -buddy adopts these concepts as foundations of the whole design to realize more improved and interactive cyber-environment for the learners of Korean as a foreign language.