This study investigates an Intelligent Personal Assistant's (IPA) ability to assist English as a Second Language (ESL) learners in developing their phonological awareness, perception, and production of the allomorphy in regular past tense marking in English (e.g. talk[t], play[d] and add[?d]). The study addresses the following questions: Can the…

This paper introduces "FineTune," a mobile application currently in development that features a gamified version of High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT). The aims of this paper are twofold: (1) to outline the theoretical motivation for the app's features, which includes a discussion of HVPT, gamification, and Self-Determination…

This study investigated the effects of using an online High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) program for university students whose first language is Japanese and who studied English as a foreign language. The target sounds were English fricatives, which many of the participants felt were challenging to distinguish and articulate. The training…

Voice interaction assistants, such as "Siri," "Alexa," or "Google Assistant," offer new opportunities to create meaningful, fun tasks for language learning that require accurate spoken production. Designing good tasks requires an understanding of the learning context and needs as well as the interactional…

This article, based on Khademi's (2021) Master's thesis, examines the use of Google Translate (GT) and its speech capabilities, Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), in helping L2 learners acquire the pronunciation of English past -ed allomorphy (/t/, /d/, /id/) in a semi-autonomous context, considering three…

This study examines the L2 pronunciation feedback provided by the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) functionality in Google Translate (GT). We focus on three Quebec Francophone (QF) errors in English: th-substitution, h-deletion, and h-epenthesis. Four hundred and eighty male and female QF recordings of sentences with correctly and incorrectly…

[For the complete volume, "CALL and Professionalisation: Short Papers from EUROCALL 2021 (29th, Online, August 26-27, 2021)," see ED616972.]This study investigated whether a translation tool (Microsoft Translator -- MT) and its built-in speech features (Text-To-Speech synthesis -- TTS -- and speech recognition) can promote learners'…

In English as a Foreign Language (EFL) situations, it is important for educators to improve learners' sound recognition skill due to the variation of English found in the world. Furthermore, perceptual skill is a foundation leading to intelligibility in production. This study examined the effects of using High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT)…

This study investigated the effects of High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) on beginner level English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Japanese learners' perceptions and productions of the English fricatives /f/, /v/ and /?/. With the use of the computer program 'English Accent Coach' (EAC, Thomson, 2017), two groups of participants were engaged…

The study explored the pedagogical use of Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesizers by comparing two groups of students learning the pronunciations associated with Regular Past Tense (RPT) marking in English (e.g. talk[t], clean[d], want[id]). While one group received TTS-based instruction, the other was taught RPT with teacher assistance. Our findings…

Wall Street English has built online activities that allow students to record phrases and receive word-level Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) driven pronunciation feedback. Students in language centres in China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Italy (N=2,867) used ASR-Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) activities, and some (N=482) completed a…

This study investigates the efficacy of explicit rhythm instruction to improve engineering students' prosody in English. A pronunciation module of ten weekly sessions of 30 minutes held within the class schedule was designed for a technical English course at Rovira i Virgili University. Sessions were outlined using a communicative framework. Two…

During the last decades of the 20th century, audiovisual products began to be audio described in order to make them accessible to blind and visually impaired people (Benecke, 2004). This means that visual information is orally described in the gaps between dialogues. In order to meet the wishes of the so-called On Demand (OD) generation that wants…

The 2021 EUROCALL conference engaged just under 250 speakers from 40 different countries. Cnam Paris and Sorbonne Université joined forces to host and organise the event despite the challenging context due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally programmed to be held on site in the heart of Paris, France, the EUROCALL organising team and executive…

This paper provides an overview of the successful pedagogical project TwitTIAMO, now in its third year, where micro blogging (Twitter) has been used in Italian language teaching and learning to improve students' communicative language skills, accuracy, fluency and pronunciation outside timetabled lessons. It also explores the background and…