This article discusses whether digital visual and audio feedback in learners' own voices improves their perception and production of lexical tones in Chinese as a foreign language. Forty-four beginners participated in a four-week training focused on the pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese tones at the word level. Half received digital feedback…

Speaking skills generally receive little attention in traditional English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms, and this is especially the case in secondary education in Indonesia. A vocabulary deficit and poor pronunciation skills hinder learners in their efforts to improve speaking proficiency. In the present study, we investigated the effects…

Traditional L2 pronunciation teaching puts too much emphasis on explicit phonological knowledge ('knowing that') rather than on procedural knowledge ('knowing how'). The advancement of mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) offers new opportunities for L2 learners to proceduralize their declarative articulatory knowledge into production skills…

The paper presents the results of a quasi-experimental study which was conducted with a view to determining the effect of an intervention in the form of the application of teacher-designed Internet-based resources (i.e., websites, podcasts, movie clips) that students could use autonomously on the development of pronunciation of the English regular…

In foreign language education, instruction in pronunciation has received less attention than instruction in other language skills. Many teachers do not know how to teach correct pronunciation due to lack of knowledge in pronunciation pedagogy even if they want to or they assume that students pick it up on their own. With the development of…

In the present study, three groups of interpreter trainees were formed, two experimental groups, i.e., blended prosody instruction (BPI) and computer-assisted prosody training (CAPT), and one control group (CON). In this experiment the participants took part in a four-week teaching program for 16 sessions (60 minutes per session), i.e., 16 hours…

This study explores collaborative and individual computer-assisted prosody training (CAPT) through a quasi-experimental design. Eighteen adult Algerian EFL learners were recruited and randomly assigned into a control group receiving no treatment and two experimental groups, a collaborative CAPT group where the participants practiced in pairs, and…

This article presents the results of a systematic review of the literature on dialogue-based CALL, resulting in a conceptual framework for research on the matter. Applications allowing a learner to have a conversation in a foreign language with a computer have been studied from various perspectives and under different names (dialogue systems,…

This study aims to explore the structural relationships among the variables of EFL (English as a foreign language) learners' perceptual learning styles and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Three hundred and forty-one (n = 341) EFL learners were invited to join a self-regulated English pronunciation training program through automatic speech…

The purpose of this research was to evaluate a prototype of an automatic speech recognition (ASR)-based language learning system that provides feedback on different aspects of speaking performance (pronunciation, morphology and syntax) to students of Dutch as a second language. We carried out usability reviews, expert reviews and user tests to…

This study investigates the effects of Acoustic Spectrographic Instruction on the production of the English phonological contrast /i/ and / I /. Acoustic Spectrographic Instruction is based on the assumption that physical representations of speech sounds and spectrography allow learners to objectively see and modify those non-accurate features in…

This study presents an efficient approach to personalized mispronunciation detection of Taiwanese-accented English. The main goal of this study was to detect frequently occurring mispronunciation patterns of Taiwanese-accented English instead of scoring English pronunciations directly. The proposed approach quickly identifies personalized…

Pronunciation errors may be caused by several different deviations from the target, such as voicing, intonation, insertions or deletions of segments, or that the articulators are placed incorrectly. Computer-animated pronunciation teachers could potentially provide important assistance on correcting all these types of deviations, but they have an…

This study investigates whether a computer assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) system can help young learners improve word-level pronunciation skills in English as a foreign language at a level comparable to that achieved through traditional teacher-led training. The pronunciation improvement of a group of learners of 11 years of age receiving…

An overview is presented of the promise and limitations of working on the computer to improve pronunciation in a second language. It is maintained that the considerable promise of the computer as an instructional tool for developing language learners' pronunciation has yet to be realized in practice. (Author/VWL)