Tiffany Ying-Yu Lin
Department of Children English Education, National Taipei University of Education
About
Assistant ProfessorSessions
Paper Presentation The Effect of Using Automatic Speech Recognition System to Improve EFL Students’ Pronunciation Performance more
Sat, Dec 4, 13:00-13:30 Asia/Taipei
Pronunciation has been an important topic in the field of English education. However, students’ pronunciation performances are often difficult to be evaluated statistically and systematically with instant feedback. To solve this problem, some studies applied Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system to help students correct the pronunciations. Yen (2019) used Learn Mode to help Taiwanese senior high school students to solve their English pronunciation problem, however, very few elementary school students in Taiwan have used this system to help with their pronunciation problems. This study aims to demonstrate how the phonetic-based ASR system, Speech Ace, could provide elementary school students phonetic-based feedback and identify the problems more precisely by investigating the effect of applying Speech Ace to improve young EFL students’ pronunciation performance. This study provides the analysis of 130 fifth grade elementary school students’ pronunciation performances and the relevance between ASR and their performances. The participants received pronunciation instructions focusing on 3 topics, including “m, n and ŋ”, “ɔ and ɑ” and “ɛ and æ” as a reviewing activity. After the instruction, the participants use Speech Ace to practice with the target words. The results are recorded and analyzed to compare the difference between the participants’ pronunciation performances before and after using Speech Ace. Our preliminary findings show the participants’ pronunciation performances improved through online practices with the ASR system, Speech Ace. The students are more engaging to improve pronunciations with gamification and multimodality based on the system, initiating positive peer competition and self-learning motivation. With ASR system, teachers can help students clarify the results more efficiently and guide the students how to practice more specifically to improve their pronunciations.
Paper Presentation Cognitive Discourse Functions and Multimodality in CLIL Science more
Sat, Dec 4, 13:30-14:00 Asia/Taipei
As CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) has been widely implemented in bilingual education, the language which teachers use in class plays a key role in helping students learn content and language at the same time. This study aims to examine how content can be introduced through the use of language with different “Cognitive Discourse Functions” (Dalton-Puffer, 2013) to help students learn content knowledge and language effectively, including seven types of Cognitive Discourse Functions: describing, defining, explaining, evaluating, categorizing, reporting and exploring. This study aims to examine how Cognitive Discourse Functions can be achieved for better learning effects in bilingual science class through the use of language and multimodality, including pictures, songs, and videos. With a classroom-based approach, three bilingual science classes in 4th grade are observed, recorded, and analyzed. There are some data which have been collected for analysis. The preliminary study will be presented in the talk. Some examples of how Cognitive Discourse Functions can be categorized and used in bilingual science class will be included. Our preliminary findings show that “DESCRIBE” and “EXPLAIN” may be the most frequently-used cognitive discourse functions in the language use in bilingual science class, while the pictures and videos used to serve the function “EXPLAIN” is most frequently used in bilingual science class. This research hopes to provide suggestions for bilingual science teachers when and how they can use the language to help and facilitate their students’ learning. For example, what language would be most commonly used when teachers want to define in their teaching. Or when teachers are trying to evaluate, maybe there are some words or specific language to help students to instruct and comprehend.
Paper Presentation Classroom-based Research for Teaching and Learning Pronunciation at Elementary School: How to solve Taiwanese EFL Learners’ Pronunciation Problems of Interdental Sounds more
Sat, Dec 4, 16:00-16:30 Asia/Taipei
Pronunciation has been an important topic in English education, especially for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners and teachers. Based on the bilingual education policy in Taiwan (The Bilingual Nation 2030 policy, 2019), one of the objectives is to improve English communication skills. Pronunciation has been one of the key factors for effective communication. Most EFL studies (Hismanoglu, 2009; Bui, T. S., 2016; Ercan & Kunt, 2019) found many EFL learners face difficulties and make errors in pronouncing interdental sound /ð / and /θ/, however, few studies examined the interdental pronunciation errors specifically with a detailed analysis. With a classroom-based approach, this research aims to employ a qualitative analysis to investigate Taiwanese elementary school EFL learners and examine their pronunciation errors of the interdental sounds, including /ð / and /θ/ in English, providing a systematic analysis and phonetic-based learning strategies for elementary school teachers to solve the pronunciation problems of interdental sounds. The research questions are as follows: (1) What errors of Taiwan elementary school EFL learners would occur in pronouncing /ð / and /θ/ in English? (2)What is the pattern of these pronunciation errors when they appear in different positions of a word? (3)What are the causes of the problems in pronouncing /ð/ and /θ/? What is the solution for Taiwanese EFL teachers and learners? This study will conduct a survey to investigate Taiwanese elementary EFL learners’ pronunciation performances with the focus on interdental sound through recordings, interviews, and questionnaires to collect and analyze the general pattern and frequency of the pronunciation errors. Our classroom-based research findings would help to categorize the interdental pronunciation errors and pinpoint pronouncing errors of the interdental sounds in different positions (beginning, middle, or end) of a word, and propose learning strategies for English teachers and learners to solve the pronunciation problems with phonetic-based effectively.
Greetings more
Sun, Dec 5, 09:00-09:05 Asia/Taipei
Dr. Tiffany Lin will give a brief introduction to the second day of the conference.
Closing Remarks more
Sun, Dec 5, 16:30-16:50 Asia/Taipei
Moderator: Dr. Jane Chien, Director, Center for Research on Bilingual Education, National Taipei University of Education
