Field Evaluation of a Single-Word Pronunciation Training System

Abstract

Many learning tasks require substantial skills training. Ideally, the student might benefit the most from having a human expert – a teacher or trainer – at hand throughout, but human expertise remains a scarce resource. The second-best solution could be to do skills training with a computer-based self-training system. This vision of the computer as tutor currently motivates increasing efforts world-wide, in all manner of fields, including that of computer-assisted language learning, or CALL. But, as pointed out by Hincks [2003], along with the growth of the CALL area comes a growing need for empirical evidence that CALL systems have a beneficial effect. This point is reiterated by Chapelle [2002] who defines the goal for Computer Assisted Second Language Research as the gathering of evidence for the effect of CALL and instructional design. This paper presents results of a field test of our pronunciation training system which enables immigrants and others to self-train their pronunciation skills of single Danish words.

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