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Language-Learning-Audio-Stretcher II: Samples
What does the Language-Learning-Audio-Stretcher introduced in an earlier blog post do to an audio file you feed in?
For illustration purposes, let’s have a look at a segment of a news broadcast. The example is(taken from the daily Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten by Deutsche Welle: a nice service of slowly spoken news for language learners – in my experience, however, not spoken slowly enough for North-American German students.
This timeline (X axis) shows what a computer program has automatically detected as pauses of varying length (Y axis) in the audio. Depending on a (safety) threshold which the user sets (manually, or, from experience, stored and loaded from a configuration file) in the dropdown boxes of the lower dialogue, the program attacks pauses from a certain threshold value up only: 
The segment below consists of a single sentence about peace negotiations with North Korea. It is shown in the following screenshot.
- 1: transcript of the original audio file
- 1a: audio graph of the original audio file
- 2: transcript of the stretched audio file. A new line in this transcript represents a pause inserted by the software.These pauses should aid language students in review the utterance last heard in memory, and hopefully parsing it correctly.
- 2a: audio graph of the stretched audio file.
- 2b: note: non-flat audio is stretched
- 2c: note: flat lines show the pauses inserted, on top of stretching the audio.
Hearing is believing:
- segment original audio:
- the same segment in the stretched audio:
This software can be applied to any of numberless public domain audio books (see Project Gutenberg or Wikipedia, audio books, as well as other free audio book sources) in mp3 or wma format (other formats can be converted). It can also can be applied to commercial audio books, if you have proper licensing.
The software comes with many options that allow you to tweak the output to your liking and needs, see prior blog post.
Plagwitz – Courses taught
Language-Learning-Audio-Stretcher
Time-stretched (-expanded or -slowed, versus, after “negative stretching”, sped-up or “compressed”) audio is of obvious benefit to language learners during listen comprehension skill training exercises, as well as other audio-lingual activities (commonly associated with non- or virtual (online) “language labs”) and an affordance of digital audio media.
As well as compressed audio, especially for repetitive audio-lingual exercises, beyond the obvious possibility of fitting more content into the same time frame since “listeners can process at a much higher rate than normal conversational speech, with some loss of comprehension” (see Roby (1996), Auditory Presentations and Language Laboratories. Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology, 821-850).
Roby, W.B. (2004). Technology in the service of foreign language teaching: The case of the language laboratory. In D. Jonassen (ed.), Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology, 523-541, 2nd ed., 526f. summarizes language learning applications of the “technical advance [of the] speech compressor–expander. This device allowed a recording to be sped up(com-pressed) or slowed down (expanded). Articles on this technology were numerous in the general educational literature from the start of the decade. Sanford Couch (1973),a professor of Russian, advocated its use. Paradoxically, it was not until 1978 that anything on speech compression appeared in the NALLD Journal (Harvey, 978). One would have expected a greater enthusiasm for this feature among language laboratory professionals. The ability to slow down a tape would seem to be a boon to students struggling with a difficult passage. Moreover, variable speed technology was not unknown in foreign-language / teaching, for Hirsch 1954) had commended the use of the soundstretcher (p.22) in the early 1950s. “
The application pictured above simplifies common audio-material producing tasks involving slowing or speeding up (or both) digital audio, with a twist: It allows for pauses being stretched more than non-pauses, thus remediating the common disadvantage of common time stretching applications that – even though pitch is now routinely maintained when altering the speed of digital audio – the result can remind one of drunk speak.
I hope this will help you use more of the many authentic foreign language audio materials available free on the internet.
What we mean by AI
Digital Domain: Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality uses recent educational field study data to draw disparaging conclusions about the utility of computers in learning (some positive conclusions seem to be right in the data also, not only depending how one values “hacking” skills). While another article in the same publication a little earlier praised the computer game as a new form of narration. Both of which reminded me of the 18th century discussion about negative effects of the novel on youth education that did not stop the printing presses (not until something better replaced them).
Learning Technologies change daily – see the recent acquisition of Wimba and Elluminate by Blackboard, see Plagwitz_CV_2010.pdf for a perspective going back a few years –; learning principles remain – from our origin as a horde of tool-carrying pack hunters that try to perfect what all “intelligent life” is based on: feedback mechanisms. In this development, we have now reached the equivalent of what was the mechanization of physical labor in the 19th century. While “artificial intelligence”, a much derided term, may still be in its infancy, it is already able to provide an efficiency advantage that foreign language learning in this country cannot do without.
Its applications range from immediately obvious forms like Natural Language Processing (I have been using Regular Expressions for automated exercise generation for many years), Speech recognition (I have applied this when administering an Auralog Tell Me more server) and Text to speech (I have implemented learning material templates in language labs that enabled students to easily lookup pronunciation of foreign language on their computers), to the most basic services the potential of which to see needs a wider vision…
Basic services (but way too time-consuming for humans to perform cost-efficiently) like search, sort, filter, track that can be used to built up an intelligent fabric that supports and makes more efficient daily language learning workflows like checking homework, keeping track of class assignments, problem students or team members (I have recommended Blackboard to University of Michigan-Dearborn in early 2001 as a platform that promises to answer these daily needs) and providing personalized services to students with differing capabilities (I have used Sanako language labs and classroom management systems, extended through my own exercise templates, to sort classes on the fly into differing subgroups and provide each with personalized instruction). 
An even more subtle implementation is the capability of “artificial intelligence”– be it as “simple” as network addressing, the term intelligence seems no less applicable than when primordial life forms first “learned” that they either vanish or starve if they come too close/stray too far from a Black Smoker; or be it as arcane as the “secret sauce” of service providers like Google or Facebook: The pervasiveness of Google news landing page or the activity stream of Facebook and other social services may make evident to all how basic, abstract building blocks consisting, of tracking, searching and sorting, can be built up to “magic”, of a service that one could have only dreamt of receiving from an office assistant.
Language Lab Web Portal, University of Michigan – Dearborn
For lack of even an LMS – which in post-secondary language lab environments in the US in the “noughties” commonly has had to double as CMS and Groupware -, the lab web portal in the post title had to fulfill many functions.
While the technically most advanced features probably was full text search against both database and file system (uploaded documents) – which I could relatively easily implement thanks to MS-SQL-Server and a limited number of database tables –, I liked best the collaborative building of a bank of language learning exercises using authentic materials, i.e. interactive websites from the target culture.
A few sample illustrations of the use in both language lab and affiliated computerized classrooms you can see here:
The list below links to a series screencasts of the Language Lab Web Portal that I made for training and demonstration purposes. They show the language lab web portal software in action:
Blackboard: Content System: Permissions, Roles and Gotchas
- The “Course user list“ refers to courses.
- The “Organization user list” refers to departmental groups. The subdivision is meaning list for our department.
- The “Institution user list” adds the most global group level.
- Finally, you can make files available to the “Public”. Note, however, that this seems to effectively bypass the more fine-grained permission checks. E.G. if you give read access to the public, users who open your files will not receive an authentication challenge, so if you try to give some of the users write access to your files, that will not trickle through. Workaround: Do not use “public”.
Quia Online Exercises
Here are examples from the Treffpunkt Deutsch Quia Website. Quia Treffpunkt Deutsch is organized in chapters which you can select from the dropdown navigation control on the left. As you see on the following page, each chapter contains 3 different types of exercises, organized in sections.
If you click on a section header, you will see a list of exercises:
Here is an example of an exercise, assigned as “A[rbeitsbuch=work book], K[apitel=chapter]9: A9[=chapter-number, again]-1[=exercise-number]”.
The letters and numbers from the assignment repeat in the exercise, see this screenshot:
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You can also hover your mouse over the info button in the upper left corner to get a summary of this information: 
Also note the link to the corresponding preparatory web page which opens in a new window (Problems getting the window to open? the popup-blocker of your web browser may be the root? instead of simply clicking on the link, try CTRL-clicking, on the link as well as the browser information bar, if it comes up). It is crucial to read/review the corresponding preparatory web page first.
It is not necessary to get everything 100% correct. It is not even a good use of your time to redo the exercise until you get everything 100% correct. Especially if you try speeding up this tedious task by doing the first round mechanically to get at the automated feedback answers, then doing the second round mechanically by pasting them in. That is why I have my Quia course “Options” set to “Calculate cumulative scores based on students’ first attempt” and to “Ignore student results after the 1st attempt”.
Therefore, you will see that you have only 1 “Attempt remaining” for each exercise. You will also, unless individually told otherwise, only have to do the exercises that are “Assigned” (consult legend at bottom of page).
Rather use the valuable error feedback to go back to the Structures and try to learn and bring any remaining questions to class – it is highly likely that fellow students have the same problems, especially if they have the same native tongue. That is also the reason why I review your submission before class – not to mark you down, but to see from your problems help what to spend valuable class time one.
Also, the exercises are integrated into the progression of the course (including your ability to do partner work with others during class meetings). That is why you will not be able to submit exercises long after when they were due:
For reviewing, we will use other materials.
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