I experience that the assignments assigned in Week 3 is harder than the earlier ones. Nevertheless it is no difficulty for the reason that we have work hard in order to accomplish the tasks. In week third I have downloaded paper titled, ‘The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skill’ written by Julia Gong from the following website : http://education.unimelb.edu.au/research/resources/student_res/postscriptfiles/vol3/vol3_1_gong1.pdf. I have downloaded one more article titled, ‘New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation’ written by Maria Grazia Busà .
Julia Gong has explored the employment of Computers in a number of ways to sustain language learning. The computer milieu is highly encouraging as well as fewer ominous caring.
The manifestations of the internet expand interface to an enormous coverage
and at the same time facilitate novice to be revealed to a true addressees. It in
the extra explored and evaluated how computers are exploited to further boost
the learners’ writing, reading and listening skills.
This critique has extensively
discovered the advantages and disadvantages of the exploitation of computers in
schooling and erudition of second language speaking skills, the definite submission
of CALL so far, and prospect developments, in the anticipation of submitting
language teachers’ interest to the relevance of CALL in instructing
verbal communication skills and supplies various helpful information supported
on easily reached literature. On the other hand, CALL speaking activities are
still in the developing stages compared with those in reading, writing and
listening. In fact, application of CALL in teaching and learning speaking is
mainly decided by the nature of speaking itself.
ICT has many advantages, such as, the environment
is highly motivating and offers a private works-pace where learners can take
risks and experiment in ways that might be psychologically threatening in a
classroom or real-life communication situation. The medium offers learners
information in wide forms and formats to set up models, or support and contextualize interaction. CD-ROMs provide large and diverse forms of
information, including texts, graphics, sound files, digitized audio and video
clips, etc. that can be accessed for speaking practice. Learners can easily turn
to handy reference sources, such as texts on grammar, lexis, or the culture of
the target country. The control-ability of CALL materials allows learners to ensue
learning at their own pace and teachers to arrange their teaching to meet
different needs. Many CALL materials can offer spontaneous feedback that can be
used both for assessment or self-assessment purposes. In many cases, this kind
of feedback can make the students' performance visualized by the
use of visual images, eg. Simplified waveform.
The submission of CALL in rising second language
speaking skills is disadvantaged in several ways. At present computers are
unable to fabricate or identify with natural language or have real verbal interface
with the users. What the CALL environment can do is provide a stimulus to
generate interaction. The feature and price tag of existing software differs very
much. Several speeches synthesizing software might fabricate a voice with a
mechanical feature that can be complex for learners to appreciate. Evaluated
with how computers are used to enhance the learners’ writing, reading and
listening skills, the application associated with the improvement of the
learners’ speaking skills is still rather weak. In a CALL survey under software
categories, the rate for speaking is much lower than those for reading, writing
and reading. As a result, the development of the unambiguous prospective of
computers in emergent speaking skills and efficient teaching with the presented
computer-based milieu involve more study for CALL researchers, program
designers and language teachers.
I have downloaded one more paper titled, ‘New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation’
written by Maria Grazia Busà , In this article Maria reviews
recent technology for teaching pronunciation, and the trends emerging in this
field. One particular method for teaching prosody, in particular intonation and
pitch patterns, is reviewed in considerable detail. This method uses speech
analysis software to provide students with visual data in addition to audio data,
and give them feedback on their L2 production.
At the very last piece, she reports on a
pilot study conducted at the University of Padova designed to implement this
pronunciation teaching method in future courses by testing the effectiveness of
using these computer-based visual feedback systems to modify non-native
speakers’ intonation patterns.
Maria has discussed new tools
in speech and communication research in details. She has further discussed Tools
for speech analysis and Tools for multimodal analysis. The
speech research tools relevant to the present paper are tools for speech
analysis, including prosodic analysis, and multimodal analysis. A widely-used
freeware program for speech analysis which is gaining increasing acceptance is Praat,
developed by Paul Boersma and David Weenink at the Institute of Phonetic
Sciences of the University of Amsterdam (NL) and available at
http://www.praat.org. Section 8of
this paper reports on a pilot project for teaching prosody to Italian learners
of English using Praat. She speech
analysis systems allow users to record, visualize and analyze speech on their
computer screen. Students using these programs can obtain an accurate
visualization of their production at both the segmental and the suprasegmental
level. In order for students to make sense of the on-screen visualizations of
their speech productions, they need to be given a theoretical background on how
to read and interpret speech signals, spectrograms and prosodic patterns of
pitch, intonation and loudness.
Therefore, these are exciting times for
second language instruction. On the other hand, new research is needed to find
teaching methods attuned with the new technology, as well as ways of improving
and implementing classroom activities which can efficiently and fittingly promote
the use of technological tools.
Thanks & the best,
Dr. Ashok Kumar
