Give every student
the speaking practice
class time can’t.
Build a speaking activity around the unit you’re already teaching, assign it to your roster, and see exactly what every student said — before the next class meets.
20 weeks free — a full semester for verified educators and their students.
Illustration of the ChitterChatter instructor dashboard: a prompt box where an instructor describes the unit being taught — for example, “My third-semester students need practice ordering food and handling a bill. Can you build something around a restaurant in Madrid?” — with pickers for the language and the proficiency level, and a button to send the request.
Your dashboard. Describe the unit you’re teaching, in any of 32 languages — the activity gets drafted around it.
How many minutes a week does each student actually speak the language?
Reading, writing, and listening can be practiced alone. Speaking needs a partner, and class time rarely gives every student enough opportunity to practice. ChitterChatter gives them more time to speak, then assesses every completed activity so you can see how each student is doing without spending hours listening.
Each student currently gets 15 minutes of assessed speaking a semester. With 1 ChitterChatter activity a week they would get 165. +150 minutes each, every one of them assessed against the objectives you set.
+150 minutes each, every one of them assessed against the objectives you set.
You build it once. They practice all semester.
Only the first step costs you time.
Describe the unit. Get a draft.
Type what you’re teaching and AI drafts the scenario, objectives, and vocabulary. Every field stays editable.
They talk it through, out loud.
A partner that listens, follows up, and adapts to their level — in the browser, on a phone if that’s what they have.
See who practiced, and what they said.
Status, estimated level, time on task, and last attempt by section — sortable, with one click through to any student’s feedback.
Each step in detail below — authoring, the feedback students get, and your dashboard.
You decide how the partner behaves.
Describe a unit in a sentence and AI drafts the whole activity. Then the interesting part: pick a moment a student might stumble, and choose what should happen.
How do you say “the bill”?
Those three choices live in one tab of four.
The editor opens on the AI draft with every field filled in. You edit what matters and leave the rest — nothing is locked, and nothing needs finishing before you can assign it.
Title, description, target language, and how long a session should run.
What students should be able to do, target proficiency level, vocabulary you want to hear, and tips they see first.
The scene, the character, voice and pace, cultural context, the opening line — and the scaffolding rules.
Which dimensions this activity is evaluated on, plus your own dimensions or a rubric.
Assign it to a section, share it to the Educator Library, or copy one a colleague has already run with real students.
Draft your first activity in about a minute.
Instructors free forever, plus a full free semester for your students.
Feedback for them. Evidence for you.
Not a score. Every note is anchored to the exact words a student said, with the audio beside it — so “work on your reflexive verbs” arrives with the three places it happened.
Buenas tardes, bienvenida. ¿Ha reservado mesa o prefiere sentarse en la terraza?
No, no tengo reserva. Quiero sentar en la terrazanote 1, por favor, hace muy buen tiempo hoy.
Perfecto, la terraza está libre. Aquí tiene la carta. ¿Le traigo algo de beber mientras decide?
Sí, gracias. ¿Qué me recomienda de la carta?note 2 Y una cervezanote 3, por favor.
El cocido madrileño está muy bueno hoy. Es un plato bastante grande, para compartir.
“Sentar” means to seat someone else. When you’re the one sitting, it takes a reflexive pronoun.
Quiero sentarme en la terraza. This pattern appeared 3 times.
You asked for a recommendation without being prompted — that was one of the activity’s goals.
The server asked you to repeat this once. The Castilian “z” is a soft th.
Two requests landed as flat statements. A question frame softens them in a restaurant.
Click a marked phrase to open its note, replay the turn, or record a retry. Students see this the moment they finish — you see the same four views from your class roster.
The whole section, not one report at a time.
A class summary you can act on, where the section stands against the level you set, and how the median has moved week by week.
Class summary
Preliminary AI observations for this section — these ratings have not been instructor-reviewed. Regenerate any time.
The section is speaking confidently, but reflexive verbs are holding a third of them back.
Most are sustaining full conversations without switching to English; the shared gap is section-wide, not a few students.
Proficiency estimates
Broad proficiency patterns across completed conversations. Estimates provide context; they are not grades.
Where the class stands
Each student’s most recent proficiency estimate
Mid
High
Low
Mid
High
Column height = number of students; the median sublevel is solid blue.
Median over time
Weekly snapshot of the class median through Mar 8
The median crossed into Intermediate Mid in week 4.
Learning goal coverage
Whether conversations addressed each evaluated objective. Coverage describes what came up — not performance quality or mastery.
Ask the server for a recommendation and respond to it
Ordering a Meal in Madrid · 21 students · 24 observations
19 of 24 students here have enough evidence for an estimate; the other 5 need at least one more rated conversation. Below the fold: coverage for every objective, assignment performance per deployment, and rubric criteria needing support — all practice context to support your judgment, not an official ACTFL rating or an automatic grade.
See your own class in this dashboard.
Set up a section, assign one activity, and the evidence starts arriving.
Designed around how people actually learn to speak.
ChitterChatter comes out of Cornell research on conversational AI for learning. Six ideas shape how activities, AI partners, and feedback are built — and why the product hands interpretation back to you rather than issuing scores.
Target i+1, not random conversation
Practice should sit close to a learner’s current level while still asking them to stretch. You set the language, level, context, vocabulary, and communication goal; the AI partner keeps the exchange moving with follow-up questions instead of jumping to unrelated topics.
Lower the affective filter so students actually speak
Anxiety, embarrassment, and fear of evaluation block students from taking risks. Practice can happen privately and asynchronously, repeat attempts make errors useful, and feedback is framed as formative guidance rather than a public performance judgment.
Align tasks with ACTFL-oriented communicative goals
Not an official rating instrument — a way to support ACTFL-aligned classroom thinking: what learners can do with language, in which contexts, with what control and interactional support. Activities are built around functions like narrating, comparing, or resolving a problem.
Design for willingness to communicate
Learners speak more when confidence, perceived competence, topic relevance, and the social situation support participation. Students rehearse familiar situations before performing them in front of others, and small successful exchanges build confidence for later real-world interaction.
Use role play as structured interactional practice
A useful speaking task gives learners a role, a goal, constraints, and a reason to negotiate meaning rather than recite known language. Students practise repair strategies — asking for clarification, rephrasing, responding to unexpected follow-ups.
Keep instructors in the interpretive loop
AI expands opportunities for practice and produces useful artifacts, but you remain responsible for goals, context, interpretation, and assessment decisions. Class-level evidence helps you decide what to revisit, model, or practise next.
Full write-ups of the methodology, our approach to AI feedback, student data privacy, and school adoption live on the Trust & Research page.
Read the researchWhy this works in a real course.
Three things that decide whether speaking practice survives contact with a syllabus.
It fits the unit you already teach
Practice is pinned to your own objectives and vocabulary, not a generic syllabus. An activity takes a sentence to draft and stays editable, so it bends to your course rather than the reverse.
32 languages, one workflow
Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi and more — the same authoring, the same dashboard, whichever language your department teaches.
No scheduling, no partner to find
Students practise at 11pm between shifts if that is when they have a quiet room. Nothing to book, nothing to pair up, and it runs in a browser on the phone they already carry.
Practice in your language.
32 supported and counting. Type yours to check.
All 32 supported languages — start typing to filter.
Don’t see yours? Most of our newest languages started as instructor requests.
Free for instructors. Always.
Your instructor account is free forever. Every verified instructor also gets 20 weeks — a full semester — of free access for their whole class.
Free forever for any instructor running a class, with a full free semester for your students.
- Unlimited activity creation (AI-assisted)
- Class dashboard & student progress
- Section management & deadlines
- All 32 languages
- Conversation feedback & review
- 20 weeks of student access — a full semester, free
For departments and institutions scaling across classrooms.
- Everything in Educator
- Centralized billing & rostering
- Bulk student access
- Per-school analytics
- .edu SSO
- Priority support
Instructors free forever · 20 weeks free for your students · No credit card
Are you a student joining a class?
Use your instructor’s invite link or sign up with your school email.
The questions instructors ask first.
Short answers before you set up your class.
Is it really free for educators?
Yes — instructor accounts are free forever, with unlimited activity creation, class dashboards, and feedback review. Verified instructors also get 20 weeks of free access for their students, which covers a full semester. No credit card required.
How do my students access ChitterChatter?
You invite them with a link or code. Students join your class, see the activities you've assigned, and start practicing without needing a separate third-party account.
Will it fit my curriculum?
It's designed to. Build scenarios that match your unit goals using AI assist, or browse our library for ready-made activities mapped to common course themes.
How are scenarios pedagogically grounded?
Activities are informed by language-teaching practice and Cornell research on conversational AI for learning, with instructors keeping control of the classroom goal and review.
Can students get feedback I haven't reviewed?
Yes. Each student gets immediate feedback after a session, covering strengths, fixes, suggested phrases, and an AI coach for follow-up questions. You can step in when you want, but they're never waiting.
Can students build their own practice activities?
Yes. Alongside the activities you assign, students can spin up their own AI-built scenarios when they want to rehearse something specific. Anything they build stays in their own practice space.
Is student data private?
Student conversations stay in ChitterChatter for class practice and review. ChitterChatter does not sell or license student audio, use it for advertising, or use it to train public models. Service providers process data only as needed to provide the service.
Does it work on student phones?
Yes. ChitterChatter runs in the browser on phone, tablet, and desktop, so students can practice wherever they have a quiet moment.
Which languages do you support?
ChitterChatter supports 32 languages, including Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Yoruba, Bangla, Persian (Farsi), Burmese, and English.
An engaged classroom is closer than you think.
Set up your roster and design your first activity. Your students can practice real conversations before the next class meets.
Set Up Your Class FreeInstructors free forever · A full free semester for your class · No credit card