Pronunciation Feedback Research Articles

Mobile speech recognition software: A tool for teaching second language pronunciation

This study examines the impact of the pedagogical use of mobile automatic speech recognition software (ASR) on the acquisition of the French vowel /y/ in production and perception. The participants were 42 beginner French students with no previous training in French phonetics and exposure to speech recognition software. They were divided into three experimental groups: (1) the ASR Group used an ASR application installed on their mobile devices to complete weekly pronunciation activities, with immediate written visual (textual) feedback provided by the software; (2) the Non-ASR Group completed the same weekly pronunciation activities in individual weekly sessions with a teacher, who provided immediate oral feedback using recast and repetitions; finally, (3) the Control Group participated in weekly individual meetings “to practice their conversation skills” with a teacher, who provided no pronunciation feedback. Following a pre-test/post-test design, our findings indicate that the ASR Group outperformed the other groups in French /y/ production, but not in perception.

English /r/-/l/ pronunciation training for Japanese speakers

Previous studies have demonstrated that perceptual training improves both perception and production by adult second-language (L2) learners. The present study examined whether production training likewise improves both perception and production. Japanese speakers underwent ten sessions of production training for English /r/ and /l/. The training combined three methods: (1) subjects received audio-visual examples and pronunciation instructions for /r/ and /l/; (2) they produced mono syllables (i.e., /ra/ and /la/) and minimal-pair words, with online feedback about their formant frequencies using a real-time spectrogram as well as pronunciation feedback from an instructor; and (3) they made recordings of minimal-pair words and compared them to "enhanced" versions of these recordings (i.e., signal-processed versions with the correct F3 frequencies and transition durations). All participants completed a battery of pre/post training tests (i.e., English /r/-/l/ identification, discrimination, perceptual mapping of best exemplars, and production). The preliminary results indicate that this training approach improves production; the results will be further discussed in terms of its effect on perception and the underlying representation of these categories.

Pronunciation feedback from real and virtual language teachers

The aim of this paper is to summarise how pronunciation feedback on the phoneme level should be given in computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) in order to be effective. The study contains a literature survey of feedback in the language classroom, interviews with language teachers and their students about their attitudes towards pronunciation feedback, and observations of how feedback is given in their classrooms. The study was carried out using focus group meetings, individual semi-structured interviews and classroom observations. The feedback strategies that were advocated and observed in the study on pronunciation feedback from human teachers were implemented in a computer-animated language tutor giving articulation feedback. The virtual tutor was subsequently tested in a user trial and evaluated with a questionnaire. The article proposes several feedback strategies that would improve the pedagogical soundness of CAPT systems.

Call–English as a Second Language

CALL for English as a second language1is an interdisciplinary area of inquiry which has been influenced primarily by educational technology (Reiser, 1987) but also by fields such as computational linguistics2and recently by applied linguistics as well. These related fields contribute diverse epistemologies which shape CALL research questions and methods. The diversity in CALL research can also be explained in party be the current variety of approaches to CALL development and use. Through the 1970s and early 1980s, pedagogical objectives in CALL were focused primarily, although not exclusively, on improving specified areas of learner's grammatical knowledge through approaches borrowed from educational technology (Hart 1981, Hope, Taylor and Pusack 1984, Wyatt 1984). Today, in contrast, CALL is used for a variety of pedagogical objectives through many different types of software such as microworlds (Coleman 1985, Papert 1980), grammar checkers (Hull, Ball, Fox, Levin and McCutchen 1987), pronunciation feedback systems (Anderson-Hseih 1994, Pennington 1991), intelligent tutoring systems (Chanier, Pengelly, Twidale and Self 1992), concordancer programs (Johns 1986, Tribble and Jones 1990), word processing (Pennington 1993), and software for computer-mediated communication (Kaye 1992). These diverse approaches to CALL are predicated on different beliefs about teaching and learning (Higgins 1995, Kenning and Kenning 1990, Sanders and Kenner 1983, Stevens 1992). Rather than reviewing these “CALL philosophies,” this article will focus on the evolution of research traditions dedicated to the empirical study of CALL use for ESL. Accordingly, the termCALL researchis employed to refer to empirical research on the use of CALL.