What came out of our conversation was a list of a wide variety of resources, some created by Meyers, that she and other instructors use with English language learners. We also discussed some of the advantages and disadvantages of using the available technology for language teaching and learning. A couple of trends popped out at me right away.
WHOLE vs. PART
One of my goals this summer is to improve my understanding of linguistics teminology. So I'm starting with some lay terms and hoping to eventually be able to include more exact terms. So, what I'm trying to summarize in "Whole vs. Part" was a pattern I noticed among the tools that Meyers is using in her teaching.
Most of the tools she was using were designed to sensitize students to different suprasegmental aspects of pronunciation such -as intonation, thought groups, word and sentence-level stress. In my mind, these are overarching aspects of "whole" language, rather than the minutia of forming individual sounds. She also showed me a few tools that assist students with production of individual phonemes, what I think of as the tiny "parts" of language that we string together to form words.
The majority of tools, however, seemed to focus on suprasegmental features. This may reflect Meyers' belief that suprasegmentals have a greater impact on the intelligibility of speech or it may be a reflection of the affordances of audio and video tools she is using to assist her students.
AWARENESS vs. PRODUCTION
The other trend that she and I talked about was the tendency to use technology to help students build an awareness of pronunciation features through listening activities, often with a visual component. Exercises or activities using technology were less likely to focus on production, or speaking. The available technology seems to be the biggest factor in this trend. For example, there are many options for creating listening exercises that employ recorded audio and a variety of student listening activities. Using technology to provide input on a learners production of specific language features is much more difficult. Although software like PRATT would allow students to see a visual representation of the speech they produce, it is unable to distinguish the most important element; intelligibility. The same is true of voice recognition software. The software's ability to understand a speaker is not an accurate assessment of their intelligibility with regards to a human listener.
I was also intrigued to get Meyers' perspective on the opportunities and limitations of using technology to teach English pronunciation. Here are a few of her observations...
Opportunities
- appeals to visual learners
- expands opportunities for self-study
- improves learner awareness of pronunciation features
- motivates tech saavy learners -Here she mentioned an interesting example of a graduate teaching asst. in an engineering related field who suddenly had a better understanding of suprasegmental language features when he was able to relate them to frequency and intensity of the sound wave pattern produced by PRAAT software. Sound waves were something he understood.
Limitations
- These tools are rarely self explanitory and still require a lot of teacher support
- not very helpful in working on issues of production
- Some students avoid tech use
- Unlike a skilled instructor, tech tools are unable to help the student focus on the pronunciation issue of greatest importance for improving intelligibility.
- Programs like PRAAT have technical limitations. For example, the length of audio sample in PRAAT needs to be fairly short in order to avoid distortion of the intonation pattern.
