4-skills | Thomas' Work Space

How to do model imitation recording exercises to improve language learner pronunciation in the LRC and beyond

2011/11/22 plagwitz Leave a comment

Sometimes teachers ask about support for voice recognition in the LRC. The term voice recognition or speech recognition (the former appears to be analogous to face recognition in authentication and other security contexts?) is usually reserved for software that can transcribe your voice into text – still no free option for this, AFAIK. Dragon naturally speaking is the oft recommended market leader outside of education (and within, Auralog Tell me more, see below). Update summer 2012: We are working on enabling the Speech recognition built into Windows 7 Enterprise for English, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), French, Spanish, German, and Japanese.
Often times, what is actually desired is a digital audio recorder with voice graph, ideally a dual track recorder.
1. In the LRC student computers, we have for exactly this purpose a digital audio recorder as part of the SANAKO Study 1200language learning system
  1. It features a dual track recorder (allows to listen to teacher track which can be a prerecorded model to imitate on the left channel while recording the student track on the right channel of a stereo track) with a voice graph: . See this dual-track-voice-graph screencast demo from the vendor and also our student cheat sheet from the vendor documentation.
  2. The Sanako is available in the LRC, as well as in many other educational institutions around the world, but neither free nor web-based (although a web-based version seems to be in the works). It currently requires MS-Windows to run.
2. A popular and free audio editor (but not an SLA – specific application, let alone geared towards model imitation; also, for all practical ends and purposes, requires an extra download and installations of an MP3 encoder to be able to save recordings as compressed MP3) is Audacity. To use for model imitation exercises,
  1. the student can open a model track (mp3 recommended)
  2. and manage within the program the imitation portion, using the voice graph:
  3. then export back out as mp3,
    1. either her responses individually (see my demo screencast, requires Windows Media Player on Windows, which actually shows a question/response rather than a model imitation, but same principle),
    2. or, by deleting the model track, the response parts mixed down to one track,
    3. or also, if, like in my demo screencast, the timeline sequence of model (with pauses) and responses is carefully managed (so that model and imitation do not overlap), mixed down to one track.
3. In one language program, I have worked extensively with Auralog Tell me more
  1. which was (not exclusively, but arguably too much) based on this pedagogic concept of having students compare the voice graph of their imitation with the model voice graph (while it do did not allow for teachers to upload their own content, and was certainly not free).
  2. To my knowledge, Auralog Tell me more does not allow for adding teacher-produced content as models.
  3. I did like the self-reflective and repetitive practice element. However, I found that students – apart from intonation and (not useful for not pitch based languages) pitch -, did not benefit as much as one might have expected from viewing the voice graph, indeed tended to get overwhelmed, even confused by the raw voice information in such a voice graph.
  4. And automated scoring of pronunciation (or speech recognition” – not free form, but on a level that has been commoditized in operating systems like Windows 7, the level of voice-directed selection between a limited set of different options, like menu options, and in the case of Auralog, choosing between different response options) seemed iffy and less than transparent in Auralog Tell me more, even though this is their primary selling point. E.g. when I made deliberate gross mistakes, the program seemed to change its standards and wave me through ( English pronunciation example; also observed by me when testing Auralog with East Asian speakers of English).
A voice graph is not the same as a more abstract phonetic transcription (although I do not know whether language learners can be trained in phonetic symbol sets like the IPA). There are now experimental programs that can automate the transcription of text into phonetic symbol sets for e.g. Portuguese or Spanish. Maybe you will find that practice with recording and a phonetic transcription of the recorded text is more useful for your students’ pronunciation practice than a fancy voice graph.

Categories: Arabic, documentation, e-languages, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek (modern), Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Screencasts, software, Spanish, Speaking, Yoruba Tags: audacity, auralog-tell-me-more, Dragon naturally speaking, sanako-study-1200

How to use the online Spanish pronunciation help to generate phonetic alphabet transcriptions and text-to-speech

2011/11/18 plagwitz Leave a comment

Go to http://showroom.daedalus.es/es/tecnologias-de-la-lengua/phonetictrans/phonetictrans.php, enter your text, select your phonetic symbol set:
Unlike with the Portuguese help, there is no text-to-speech option here.

Categories: Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, e-languages, Intermediate, learning-materials, Spanish, Speaking, websites Tags: links, phonetics, transcribing

Troubleshooting the wireless headsets in the TV viewing area

2011/11/18 plagwitz Leave a comment

For lack of small group work areas, the 3 headsets help sharing the LRCROOMCOED433. They amplify the sound for the TV viewing audience, allowing to turn the TV volume down so as not to disturb other users in the shared area.
No sound?
1. headsets turned on?
2. headset volume turned up?
3. headsets batteries dead?
4. transmitter turned on?
Static noise on headsets?
1. headsets batteries weak?
2. no line of sight to transmitter?
Other things you can try:

a different headset. We have 3.
a different transmitter. We have 2.

An image says more than 1000 words:

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, documentation, e-infrastructure, hardware, headphones, Listening, TV-viewing-area Tags: FAQs, films

Web-based romanized letters to Cyrillic transliteration tool.

2011/11/16 plagwitz Leave a comment

Our Russian tutor uses this transliteration tool HTTP://TRANSLIT.RU which allows for phonetic input on a keyboard that does not have Cyrillic letters and seems popular with native speakers of languages written in Cyrillic.
As so often, that implies: not designed for language learners. The explanation attests to that:

Categories: Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-languages, Intermediate, Russian, websites, Writing Tags: character-input, websites

Microsoft Contextual Translator

2011/11/14 plagwitz Leave a comment

Certainly an advance over the MS-Word thesaurus (unlike the MS-Word 2007 and up spell check, still not contextual). Does this work at least well enough to serve as a fruitful pedagogical exercise: “Which phrase does not belong in the group?”

Categories: Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, e-languages, English, Intermediate, Speaking, websites, Writing Tags: links, thesaurus

Streaming Problems with Realmedia via RTSP from ereserves with VLC Player (and Internet Explorer. And NetOp School)

2011/11/10 plagwitz Leave a comment

VLC-player
1. version 1.1.9, but also currently newest 1.1.11 as well on Windows CXP SP 3
2. opens from IE8 and Firefox 3.6
3. but is not able to play files (tested even multi) through. Rather, it nicely falls on its face, with the audio stream simply appearing to stop, mid-sentence, after 2:38 (pretty consistently – a buffering bug? A great way to slip through pre-testing).
4. In the LRC, I could hardly bring the taskswitcher up, let alone (15 minutes of waiting) the task manager, to even find that vlc.exe is the culprit, with a CPU utilization of 99% solid (Ouch!).
5. Not quite so bad in the office computer where it hovered slightly above 25%, maybe busying only one CPU core.
My Google searches do not find anything quite similar.
RealPlayer 14 to the rescue?
1. In IE8, RealPlayer does not open when clicking on the web page link with the RM file which causes a dialogue to open if VLC-player is the default player, rather a strange unplayable content error..
3. In Firefox, RealPlayer open and plays (and pre-buffers) the stream completely.
4. Note that ereserves “download as zip” cannot serve as a workaround: gives you only the links like http://dlib4.uncc.edu/streaming/media_play.php?file=9364cb66b9e1cae26aed0f471e9eab5b, which require you to re-authenticate, even if in the same browser session, and do not redirect to the resource, neither audio nor web page form which you could launch the audio (in short, I do not get what this download as zip is good for)
5. Next Problem: This may work on my office computer. In the lab we have NetOp School installed. That adds another layer of NetOp School problems which look like they can be resolved ~~next time the lab is reimaged. For now, use instead audio from Moodle metacourses where possible.~~ next time I get around to design and run a Symantec-Ghost Software and File Action on the computers (all LRC lab PCs) and test the result (on PC10) which was now.