I have a language teacher who came to me with a question: isn't there some technology that can help one of my students practice listening to, imitating, and perfecting his second language? This particular student just needed additional reinforcement to hear the differences between his speech and that of a native speaker.
I set the student up with a microphone/headset and helped him learn how to use Audacity (great shareware program if you don't know about it) such that he can listen to snippets of a dialogue, then mute the native speaker's voice and add his own on a separate soundtrack. Then he can compare the two, either by listening to them one at a time or simultaneously. In addition to the auditory reinforcement, Audacity provides a spectrogram of the audio, kind of a voiceprint waveform of the speech sound, which is another cue from which the student can learn.
Through a little practice time, I showed the student that the more closely his spectrogram matches that of the native speaker, the more "correct" his speech is going to be. As a fledgling linguist, I learned how to "read" a spectogram and could identify vowels, consonants, fricatives, and so on by sight, rather than by sound. Audacity has many great features that let you stretch out or slow down the audio, and its visual representation, to help kids who may be more visual than auditory learners improve language acquisition.
At the end of a 15-minute session (much of which was spent just figuring out our approach), the teacher told the student he could already hear a difference in his pronunciation! Such a small investment of time and equipment made such a great difference. The student's face beamed with the encouragement from the teacher and we sent him on his way, headset in hand. Pretty exciting.
I set the student up with a microphone/headset and helped him learn how to use Audacity (great shareware program if you don't know about it) such that he can listen to snippets of a dialogue, then mute the native speaker's voice and add his own on a separate soundtrack. Then he can compare the two, either by listening to them one at a time or simultaneously. In addition to the auditory reinforcement, Audacity provides a spectrogram of the audio, kind of a voiceprint waveform of the speech sound, which is another cue from which the student can learn.
Through a little practice time, I showed the student that the more closely his spectrogram matches that of the native speaker, the more "correct" his speech is going to be. As a fledgling linguist, I learned how to "read" a spectogram and could identify vowels, consonants, fricatives, and so on by sight, rather than by sound. Audacity has many great features that let you stretch out or slow down the audio, and its visual representation, to help kids who may be more visual than auditory learners improve language acquisition.
At the end of a 15-minute session (much of which was spent just figuring out our approach), the teacher told the student he could already hear a difference in his pronunciation! Such a small investment of time and equipment made such a great difference. The student's face beamed with the encouragement from the teacher and we sent him on his way, headset in hand. Pretty exciting.
No comments:
Post a Comment