ABSTRACT
LingWorlds uses dynamically generated speech from a digitized phrasal lexicon to produce its side of the tutor-student dialogue. The student's part of the dialogue consists of acts in the microworld. Thus, LingWorlds in its directed tutoring mode conforms to the type of conversational interaction in which the tutor plays the role of Commander, according to the framework defined by Hamburger to characterize two-medium dialogues. LingWorlds, which is a full object-oriented programming system, offers the teacher a rather large amount of programming power, if the teacher wants to use it, while permitting teachers who have less experience with the facility to build on simple simulations previously stored in a library. The pedagogical model behind LingWorlds requires many small problem-solving environments as well as many simple tutoring control strategies. These requirements motivated us to create a high-level authoring system. The speech output of LingWorlds is activated by user-generated, tutor-generated, or other internal events directed to interactors.
