Thomas' Work Space

The pervasiveness of networked digital media – new delivery forms for digital TV and radio by the traditional media industry, as well as new content providers using pod- and tube-casts -, owing to an ever more powerful, robust and – partially as an overhang of the bubble – abundant technical hard- and software infrastructure, has also revitalized – and poured substantial new resources into the modernization of – the older concept of the language lab. Computerized classrooms with network and multimedia facilities, basic classroom management systems and centralized databases, with some interfacing to serve as learning material repositories or portfolios demonstrating learning outcomes, have become a common underlying fabric for many of the constituents’ learning environments. The recent freezing up of the resource flow can serve as a wakeup call to remind us both of the critical “What is the benefit, or return on investment?” and of the original promise of e-learning: increased efficiency. On the one hand, scaling through crowd-sourced or automated sourcing and reuse of materials has become a pressing need in rapidly expanding second language programs like English and Spanish that new technologies can help meet. On the other hand, widely differing learner proficiency is increasingly a problem when trying to form classes in the shrinking programs of other languages, and personalization of learning provision is increasingly expected in an environment shaped by “long tail”-economies. This paper will evaluate common practices in SLA that have served as workaround, recapitulate a number of different time-stretching algorithms, summarize existing software solutions and introduce a new option which is based on MS-Windows Media Encoder’s time-stretching and pause detection capabilities. Finally, the presentation will exemplify instructor-led utilization of this simplified and/or automated time-stretching of authentic materials, with more teacher-control and a more realistic output than that built into current media players, as a – not exclusive, but valuable – step towards more comprehensible input of level “i+1” in a more personalized language learning provision.

Slide Deck: plagwitz_timestretching_audio_nerallt09.pdf