Innovation Profile 057

Speaking to computers helps learning

If you are learning a language it is vitally important to develop your fluency by practising speaking. Young children do this by endlessly repeating phrases to their parents until they get the desired reaction.

Language teachers cannot listen like this to all their students, but computer language teaching software that has speech-recognition can do this. Computers can be available to listen when required and can provide much more feedback to each student in the class than a teacher could.

It is strange that very young children in mixed language areas will naturally and quickly learn several languages, yet in schools many students struggle to learn a new language.

Many attempts have been made over the last fifty years to use language laboratories and other equipment to make language learning more natural, but these did not work very well. The difference now is that speech recognition by computer is possible.

Since the beginning of the 90's Auralog has been developing language learning software that uses speech recognition (http://www.auralog.com). This has taken language learning into a third stage. All language teachers, education managers and policy makers need to understand what is possible now, because language learning can be made very much more effective and efficient.

There is an excellent overview of the history of speech recognition and language learning on the Auralog web site (http://www.auralog.com/en/reco.html - or /fr, and they have sites in German, Italian and Spanish). This also illustrates the many ways students can be helped with their pronunciation, such as through analysing pronunciation techniques and by providing visible waveforms of their speech for them to compare with correct pronunciation.

When you attend school/college classes to study your mother tongue, the lesson is to help you use the language better and to appreciate creativity through the language. When you attend a foreign language class most of the time is spent just learning to speak the language. This need not be so. With software such as Auralog's 'TeLL me More' students could do much of the basic learning to speak out of class, allowing the teacher to use student contact time to greater effect.

The Auralog Company Profile on our web site will give you an overview of the company.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

If you know of examples of innovative use of ICT-for-learning that others would be interested in, please email innovations@eep-edu.org

_________________________________________________________________________________________