PAPEL: A Collaborative System for Parental Guidance during Preschool Play-Based English Learning

Play-based parent-child interaction offers preschoolers rich opportunities for everyday foreign language learning, yet many parents struggle to turn open-ended play into effective English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) learning experiences at home. To explore how AI might support this process, we conducted formative studies through interviews and a Wizard-of-Oz study. We identified four key challenges: content selection, language expression, balancing instruction and play, and problem solving. To address these challenges, we present PAPEL, a parent–AI collaborative system that grounds suggestions in the ongoing play scene and organizes support into four core modules: content generation, language adaptation, balance assessment, and extended response. In a counterbalanced within-subjects study with 16 parent–child dyads, PAPEL was associated with more integrated parent utterances that combined playful and instructional content, as well as more parent–child conversational turns, than the lightweight chatbot baseline used in our study.