Archive
Google-Translate for phonetization?
- Google-Translate also offers some phonetic transliterations. You may have noticed this when attempting (remember, though, that it is for a reason that they link to “professional translation” services, and also invite anybody to amend the machine translation offered) to translate from English into other languages,
- However, if you type or paste non-Romanized text into the source textbox, you also get the option button “read phonetically” (meaning transliterate to phonetic symbols or phonetize).
- Limited use in the LRC: Few languages are supported.
- Only languages written in non-roman letters are offered. E.g. French or German are not deemed difficult enough (I know a few that would beg to differ
).
- Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew are also not supported (root cause: right-to-left? Strangely these right-to-left-languages work in the TBA:Google transliterate IME which attempts to do roughly the opposite of phonetization):
- Leaves: Chinese, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Russian. However, note finally that not a standard phonetic alphabet is being used either for these transcriptions.
Making audio cues for model imitation/question-response oral exams with Sanako Study 1200
We can easily record and post-process audio files in the LRC for use with the Sanako Study 1200 oral exam activities.
This can work not only for outcome exams (course- or chapter-wise), but also or formative assessment:
Think converting your textbook-based “drills” into Sanako, like repetitively recapitulating the newly acquired vocabulary item “donut” with different cues:
Example: “What can you do with [student can enter her favorite new vocabulary item for the current class] on [teacher can ask for one social web service after the other that her students likely are familiar with]?”. In response, student has to practice vocabularry item by forming sentences that fit the vocabulary item that fit like in the whiteboard example.
We can add to these recordings the features explained in the slide below.
I’d be happy to play you examples from this slide – and more – in the LRC (not to be published here so that the exam files can be reused).
Spring 2012 Faculty Workshop II: Oral Proficiency testing with Audacity/Sanako
- View screens (best viewed side by side, but note that left and right screen are not synchronized):
- for full slide show (note the included short links for convenient further reading), left screen
- for Sanako interface and full audio track, right screen
.
- for full slide show (note the included short links for convenient further reading), left screen
- Table of contents:
- Overview of a Sanako Oral Exam
- Examples of Exam teachers’ exam question recordings
- Example of a Sanako Exam
- Loop induction
- creating an exam question recording
- by taking a Sanako exam as a student
- Step-by-Step of administering a Sanako oral exam
- Grading Sanako oral exam student files
- Sanako voice insert for
- facilitating recording oral assignments for student without hard-coded pauses
- commenting on student responses during grading
- Sanako voice insert for
- Sanako authoring tool for providing visual on top of aural cues to students
How to use visual instead of aural cues during a Sanako oral proficiency exam
- This exam file has been authored with the Sanako Study 1200 TBA:authoring tool. It is displayed from the Sanako tutor application:
- images on a projection screen connected to the teacher computer,
- aural portion through the tutor-controlled Sanako student player and headsets.
- To protect the integrity and allow for reuse of the exam, only the initial instruction, example and collection of the results of an exam with visual cues are shown in this screencast
.
Protected: Sanako Study 1200 Final oral exam for advanced Business Spanish: A Job interview
Independent study with free language learning materials from the FSI?
The Foreign Service Institute language learning materials – consisting of scanned documents and digitized audio of multiple courses per language – were still a heavily-advertised resource when I visited the Defense Language Institute in Monterey in 2006.
It is nice to see these resources be made available for free. It is also nice to see the progress that has been made not only in technological adaptation of textbook learning materials since these materials were made available (post WW II?).
This, however, comes at a cost. If you shun it, and do not take a course that works which requires (and entitles you to the use of) a textbook, here are easily accessibleviewable learning materials for a large set of languages, including many LCTL: Amharic, Arabic, Bulgarian, Cambodian, Cantonese, Chinese, Chinyanja, Czech, Finnish, French, Fula, German, Greek, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Igbo, Italian, Japanese, Kirundi, Kituba, Korean, Lao, Lingala, Luganda, Moré, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Shona, Sinhala, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Twi, Vietnamese, Yoruba.
The Forums , however seem to indicate that not too many still use these options. The transformation into a (technologically superficially) more modern format here is limited to very few languages and courses (and crashed my web browser).
Questions? Read the About. Or just ask me a quick Our Databases: Resources with calendars -- Language learning material Moodle Sites, multimedia files -- films
FAQs for LRC student staff or for students or for teachers. To search our FAQs, in the browser addressbar, add after "https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/feed/?tag=faqs+/" "+TAG1" (from tag cloud below) OR "https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/feed/tag=faqs
&category_name=" "CAT1" (from category hierarchy below). OR search both categories and tags, and multiple TAGs/CATs (connect with "," for OR-search, with "+" for AND-search), like so: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/feed/?tag=TAG1+TAG2+...TAGn&category_name=CAT1
+CAT2+...CATn"
Other ways to find help
If you cannot find it here, look there: 5,500 Language-Learning Links and Programs for learning or teaching 150 languages
Shortcuts:Our Lists, Our Maps, LRC Staff Moodle Site,LRC Project Moodle Site, 49erexpress, UNCC Moodle, Student Recordings: s:claslcslrcsanakostudent
Learning usage samples: Sanako oral exam, Kaltura webcam presentation, Dictation with speech recognition, Sanako written exam, Chinese and Japanese interactive stroke-order practice
Test the Sanako Installer, Webbrowser Popup Konfigurator for XP, or Windows7, faster LRC TeacherPC Log-in Let MS facilitate diacritics writing by installing for you US-International keyboard layout
This is my personal blog (Google+). The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer. The information in this weblog is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Thomas' Work Space 