Abstract
Speech corpora play an important role in phonetic research and have been applied in daily life. Their application can be found in pronunciation teaching and learning. This article takes Jianghuai mandarin, a transitional dialect between northern and southern dialects in China, as an example to illustrate the necessity and procedures about the construction of an English speech corpus of learners with dialectal backgrounds. It shows that such corpus can be applied to help improve English pronunciation teaching and learning with its technical power in saving large audio data and its annotation with voice editing and analyzing software. It assists, when working together with Praat, to visually demonstrate spectrogram of similarities and differences between English and native language. It also functions to raise pronunciation awareness and help improve learners’ pronunciation. It is expected to be useful in stimulating teachers and learners to study pronunciation based on data analysis of physical features of recorded audio sound.
Highlights
Much attention has been paid to the construction and application of speech corpora because of the important role that speech corpora play in linguistic research, especially in phonetic research
This paper focus on English learners in China to illustrate the construction of English speech corpora of learners with dialectal backgrounds due to the fact that they contribute to a large percentage of English learners around the world
No matter whether similarity or difference leads to acquisition difficulties and problems, English speech corpora like these would help learners avoid negative native language transfer in English pronunciation learning, and help them improve pronunciation learning with recorded sampling data that are authentic and convincing
Summary
A corpus is a collection of data. It is constructed with a certain technology and method for research or application. There are corpora collecting spoken and/or written data. A speech corpus contains speech data, usually in audio form, with the help of recorders, computers, recording software, and voice editing and/or analyzing software. Speech corpora and relevant technologies make it possible for researchers to analyze features of speech data, and to seek and reveal representative speech phenomena and patterns through quantitative and qualitative analysis. The development of voice reading and dialing, based on phonetic synthesis and large-scale speech corpora, is a welcoming achievement of the application. With their research stepping forward steadily, are found to be helpful in language teaching and learning as well, including pronunciation teaching and learning
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