Students can ask the computer to repeat the instructions or translate them into English. There are vocabulary lessons before and after the cooking.

Professor Seedhouse became interested in the idea after he visited a talking kitchen designed for a different purpose.

PAUL SEEDHOUSE: “It was actually for communicating with people who suffer from dementia. And so, for example, it can speak to those people and it can tell them, for example, that they’ve left the oven on and they should switch the oven off.”

He says the French Digital Kitchen turns the process of learning language into a real-life experience.

PAUL SEEDHOUSE: "Here you’re taking it out of the classroom and you’re actually using the language to produce something which you can eat at the end of it. It’s very enjoyable.”

But the idea -- known as task-based language learning -- required a few changes as the researchers were designing the system.

PAUL SEEDHOUSE: "For example, we’ve found that we put a sink full of water, right, and as soon as people have finished cooking with an instrument, they throw it in the water. And for us that’s deadly because the digital sensors were immediately ruined by being in the water. Okay, so - so you have to take actions so that you don’t have water in the sink and you tell people not to throw them in the sink."

The system could be available for sale by the end of twenty twelve. Adding the technology to a new kitchen could add an estimated ten to twenty percent to the building costs. The system could also be added to an existing kitchen.