Speaking | Thomas' Work Space

Phonetic transcription websites

2012/07/03 plagwitz Leave a comment

Computerized Language resource centers are supposed to work wonders improving SLA students’ pronunciation: Can’t computers analyze and visualize sound for us?

However, it turned out there seems to be a considerable “impedance mismatch” not only between computers analyzing and understanding the signal, but also between a computer voice graph and the capability of a language learner to process and improve pronunciation on the basis of it.

Voice graphs may have some use for tonal languages. But can you even tell from a voice graph of a letter which sound is being produced?

Enter the traditional phonetic transcription that pre-computerized language learners remember from their paper dictionaries (provided you can teach your language learners phonetic symbol sets like the IPA). Not only are good online dictionaries perfectible capable of displaying phonetic symbol sets on the web (it’s all in Unicode nowadays).

There are now experimental programs that can automate the transcription of text into phonetic symbol sets for e.g. English, Portuguese or Spanish. The more advanced ones also come with text-to-speech.

You can provide your students with audio (or, text-to-speech capability provided) or text models and have them study the phonetic transcription, listen to the audio, and record their model imitation in the LRC. 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: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Dictionaries, Speaking Tags: phonetics, phonetizing

How the LRC supports Second Language Acquisition (all 4 skills) and testing using computers, and provides requisite documentation and training

2012/06/28 plagwitz Leave a comment

Table of contents for 2 screencasts of a presentation, left screen slides/no audio, right screen/speaker audio – best viewed side-by-side.

Time in LRC-report-speaker	Time in LRC-report-slides	Topic	Subtopic
	0:00	Overview of LRC activities
0:00	0:40	SLA reading
0:02	1:10	SLA writing
1:00			high-stakes quiz screencast: http://goo.gl/AaGrK
3:40			Movie caption exercise generation using NLP
5:45	2:35	SLA listening	Text-to-speech Deskbot
7:15	4:00		example of time-stretched audio
10:00	10:10	SLA speaking	Moodle Kaltura for webcam recordings homework assignments
12:30			Sanako oral exams
	15:00		Example of oral exam material
16:40	15:45	Classroom management systems
27:15			Outlook: LRC as proficiency assessment/testing center, outreach/service to high schools
	16:40		Example of oral proficiency exam
28:30			Needed additions: video streaming to students, video recordings from students
30:10		Question period
30:10			LRC media repositories
33:30		Infrastructure work:	Year1:Ghost+imaging
33:35			Year2:LRC calendars (room reservation, equipment circulation, staff timetabling)
34:25			Outlook: things that need to be fixed in LRC calendars
39:25
39:45	19:45	LRC Blog
39:45			Querying tags and categories
45:00			tags, categories, RSS feeds displayed in internet explorer tag display,
55:20			Using tags/categories searches of the LRC blog in training teachers and students
57:25		Q:TOEFL, AP exams and other oral proficiency assessment –
58:45		Webcape placement exams and other written exam in the LRC
59:30		Q:Concurrent exam scheduling	Sanako has no scheduling system to allow a limited number of users to take an exam simultaneously (but it prevents users beyond the licensing seats to use the Sanako, including for exams), Scheduling plug-ins seem to be available for Moodle.
61:40			Outlook: Need more licenses for the Sanako to match the UNCC class size

Spring 2012 Faculty Workshop II: Oral Proficiency testing with Audacity/Sanako

2012/04/30 plagwitz Leave a comment

View screens (best viewed side by side, but note that left and right screen are not synchronized):
1. for full slide show (note the included short links for convenient further reading), left screen
2. for Sanako interface and full audio track, right screen.
Table of contents:
1. Overview of a Sanako Oral Exam
2. Examples of Exam teachers’ exam question recordings
3. Example of a Sanako Exam
4. Loop induction
5. Step-by-Step of administering a Sanako oral exam
6. Grading Sanako oral exam student files
  1. Sanako voice insert for
    1. facilitating recording oral assignments for student without hard-coded pauses
    2. commenting on student responses during grading
7. Sanako authoring tool for providing visual on top of aural cues to students

How a teacher can use Sanako voice insert to easily add spoken comments to students’ Sanako oral proficiency exams

2012/04/25 plagwitz Leave a comment

All other things equal (given a limited amount of time), teachers can provide more and better corrective feedback on student oral proficiency recordings if, during their grading, they could easily insert their own oral comments into the students’ recordings (delivered as MP3 files to teachers’ desktops after Sanako oral exams).
Both the Sanako Tutor and Student Player have a voice insert mode that is much easier and quicker to use than (albeit not free as) editing the student audio in Audacity (which we still recommend for bare-bone viewing/listening because of Audacity’s capability of loading and displaying multiple tracks simultaneously).
Fortunately, Sanako tutor/student player are available on the teacher/student station PCs in the LRC (the latter’s insert function is available when the PC connected to the running Sanako Tutor on the teacher station).
How easy and fast is it to use this? As you can see in this demo screencast on how to use Sanako voice insert to add spoken comments into your students’ Sanako oral exams, voice insert only requires:

a click on the voice insert button in the center, whenever a user wants to speak during listening,
and, from the top left menu, a “file”/ “save as” at the end.

In a next step – not only during the grading process –, how easy is it to distribute student recordings made with Sanako to students? That is TBA:a different story.

Categories: audience-is-teachers, digital-audio-lab, e-languages, grading, multimedia-recording, Presenter-Computer, Screencasts, service-is-assessing, Speaking, Student-Computers Tags: audacity, sanako-study-1200, student.exe, voice-insert

Protected: Sanako Study 1200 Final oral exam for advanced Business Spanish: A Job interview

2012/04/19 plagwitz Enter your password to view comments.

Protected: Spring 2012 Faculty Workshop I: How to ease your end-of-term oral assessment burden with the help of the LRC Moodle Kaltura and Sanako Study 1200 oral assessments

2012/04/06 plagwitz Enter your password to view comments.

Moodle Kaltura teacher and student video uploads combined

2012/03/16 plagwitz Leave a comment

You can combine
1. a Model/Question video, uploaded by the teacher as a video resource
2. with an Imitation/Response video captured by the student.
Cons:

When viewing the teacher upload video models/questions, the student has to alternate between pause/play (which are not even on the same button).
Student does not have to also handle pausing/restarting the video recording, but that may be another con: The student cannot pause her video, so the grader will have to skip over pauses in his recording.