Rapid Generation of Pronunciation Dictionaries for new Domains and Languages

This dissertation presents innovative strategies and methods for the rapid generation of pronunciation dictionaries for new domains and languages. Depending on various conditions, solutions are proposed and developed. Starting from the straightforward scenario in which the target language is present in written form on the Internet and the mapping between speech and written language is close up to the difficult scenario in which no written form for the target language exists

Statistical morphological disambiguation with application to disambiguation of pronunciations in Turkish /

The statistical morphological disambiguation of agglutinative languages suffers from data sparseness. In this study, we introduce the notion of distinguishing tag sets (DTS) to overcome the problem. The morphological analyses of words are modeled with DTS and the root major part-of-speech tags. The disambiguator based on the introduced representations performs the statistical morphological disambiguation of Turkish with a recall of as high as 95.69 percent. In text-to-speech systems and in developing transcriptions for acoustic speech data, the problem occurs in disambiguating the pronunciation of a token in context, so that the correct pronunciation can be produced or the transcription uses the correct set of phonemes. We apply the morphological disambiguator to this problem of pronunciation disambiguation and achieve 99.54 percent recall with 97.95 percent precision. Most text-to-speech systems perform phrase level accentuation based on content word/function word distinction. This approach seems easy and adequate for some right headed languages such as English but is not suitable for languages such as Turkish. We then use a a heuristic approach to mark up the phrase boundaries based on dependency parsing on a basis of phrase level accentuation for Turkish TTS synthesizers

The relationship between otitis media and literacy outcomes of urban indigenous Australian school children

The literacy skills of 57 Indigenous Australian early-school students in Perth were compared by their ear health status where hearing loss (HL) and otitis media (OM) (highly prevalent in the population) was tested up to five times in the year prior to the culturally modified literacy assessment. No significant differences were found. The students showed overall improvement on all outcomes following a 15 hour targeted phonological awareness intervention. No differences in improvement were shown between the children with and without OM/HL

Text Complexity Levels and Second Language Reading Performance in Indonesia

This study examined the effect of text complexity on L2 reading performance of Indonesian students with different language proficiency levels. Four passages consisting of two low complexities and two high complexities were given to participants. Text complexity levels were analysed using Flesch’s reading ease index or grade level formula (Flesch, 1948, 1951, 1979),Text-Evaluator designed by Education Testing Service (2013), and Coh-Metrix version 3.0 indexes (McNamara, Louwerse, Cai & Graesser, 2013). Additionally, Pearson’s correlation, regression and one-way ANOVA were employed. There were 1054 university EFL students participating in this study. The findings revealed that text complexity had a moderate correlation and significantly contributed to L2 reading. Keywords: text complexity, reading comprehension, readabilit

EFL Teachers’ Reconciliation with Moral Forces Brought into Curriculum

This paper presents EFL teachers’ strategies when reconciling with moral forces underpinning Indonesian curricula: School-based curriculum and character education policy. While School-based curriculum allows teachers to develop more flexible EFL classes, the character education policy promotes such controlled EFL classes that the teachers are required to focus on students’ moral behaviour. The moral forces of the school-based curriculum resonate with communicative language teaching regarding the teachers’ opportunity for developing teaching materials to meet learners’ needs. This paper suggests that the EFL teachers have particular dilemmas as they attempt to embrace the moral forces of two curricula. Keywords: EFL teachers, character education, curriculum reform, moral forces, pedagogic practic