LE-Story: An Intelligent Storytelling Environment for Chinese Learning

A story is a narrative structure with a high cause and effect context which enables the story to make an enduring impression on people. For this purpose, many language learning environments use storytelling as foundation to increase degree of understanding and learning interest. However, most current storytelling systems in language learning have little flexibility in the connection between the course content and the storytelling resources. In this paper, we have developed an intelligent storytelling system which is used to adapt the ‘after school practice’ concept for Chinese language learning called LE-Story. This system uses lively events (LEs), which are derived as an empirical result of our project survey, as basic course units. The students can choose these events and produce their discourse about daily life. In this system, we focus on the process of storytelling by the students. Students can compose a sentence from phrases for language exercise. The system uses the ‘drag and drop’ method to prevent the improper usage of the phrases in the storytelling process. The system uses web ontology language (OWL) to present our LEs and students’ stories.