The Use of Real English in Language Learning: Making Authentic NS Speech Accessible Through a Novel Digital Slow-down Tool

This project is concerned with the design of English as a Second Language (ESL) courseware for Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). It arises out of the Enterprise Ireland funded DITCALL (Digital Interactive Toolkit for Computer Assisted Language learning) project. The focus of the research for this courseware is on using authentic video and audio material that is as natural and true to life as possible and providing adequate, pedagogically efficient and visually pleasing lesson material that will prepare prospective students for the environment in Dublin. The thesis centres around the validity of using authentic spoken Native Speaker (NS) English, and investigates how learners of English can be facilitated in improving their listening and language processing skills when practicing with authentic material. A novel approach to making in particular spoken authentic material available to the language learner by way of a digital slow-down tool, which slows down speech without distortion, is presented in this thesis. Testing carried out for the present study furthermore indicates that the use of the patented DITCALL digital slow-down tool enhances word recognition in rapid speech and make authentic NS speech accessible to all levels of learner, enhances and improves performance in, especially, listening skills and, it is felt, also facilitates the student’s ability to process spoken Native Speaker (NS) English. This thesis also explores the NS’s preferred listening and speaking styles and the importance of cultural background information for language learners, looking in particulatr at the issue of acculturation. This study attempts to pinpoint which skill improvement strategies are most beneficial for Non-native Speakers (NNSs), and which will facilitate their acceptance in the target language speech community

Teaching and Learning Amidst Difference and Diversity

This paper considered classroom management strategies for working with diverse, multicultural groups of students in higher education settings

The Need for a Speech Corpus

This paper outlines the ongoing construction of a speech corpus for use by applied linguists and advanced EFL/ESL students. The first section establishes the need for improvements in the teaching of listening skills and pronunciation practice for EFL/ESL students. It argues for the need to use authentic native-to-native speech in the teaching/learning process so as to promote social inclusion and contextualises this within the literature, based mainly on the work of Swan, Brown and McCarthy. The second part addresses features of native speech flow which cause difficulties for EFL/ESL students (Brown, Cauldwell) and establishes the need for improvements in the teaching of listening skills. Examples are given of reduced forms characteristic of relaxed native speech, and how these can be made accessible for study using the Technological University Dublin’s slow-down technology, which gives students more time to study native speech features, without tonal distortion. The final section introduces a novel Speech Corpus being developed at DIT. It shows the limits of traditional corpora and outlines the general requirements of a Speech Corpus. This tool–which will satisfy the needs of teachers, learners and researchers–will link digitally recorded, natural, native-to-native speech so that each transcript segment will be linked to its associated sound file. Users will be able to locate desired speech strings, play, compare and contrast them—and slow them down for more detailed study

DIT’s Dynamic Speech Corpus and Dialogic Fluency

Monologic fluency is characterised by a lack of pauses and a smooth oral delivery. Dialogic fluency in L1-L1 unscripted speech, however, is characterized by seeming dis-fluency, hesitations, false starts etc. Yet the L1 speakers make perfect sense to each other. The Dynamic Speech Corpus (DSC) currently being developed under the FLUENT project at the Technological University Dublin (DIT). In dialogue, language represents only one of the communication channels at play in what is a dynamic, unscripted social interchange rather than a stand-alone linguistic performance. The language stream is supplemented by pragmatic considerations and a greater emphasis on prosody. DIT’s DSC is based on natural, native-to-native dialogues and recorded at a high level of audio quality and is being developed mainly for autonomous learners. It will afford access to a unique audio resource based on unscripted dialogues between friends and acquaintances, exemplifying informal, native-speaker speech and natural turn-taking, rather than scripted interactions. The presentation demonstrates how users can locate and study samples of L1-to-L1 speech, as well as various phonetic phenomena such as speed-induced elisions in their full, pragmatic, dialogic context. This will allow the learner user to focus on the manner in which native speakers produce reduced forms and slow them down for detailed study. The corpus will be a rich resource for users who wish to study the communicative value of prosody and formulaic sequences, and particular attention will be paid to turn-taking strategies, along with other forms of interaction, which some researchers see as a ‘fifth skill’

HTML5 and the Learner of Spoken Languages

Traditional corpora are not renowned for being user friendly. If learners are to derive maximum benefit from speech corpora, then better interfaces are needed. This paper proposes such a role for HTML5. DIT’s dynamic speech corpus, FLUENT, contains a limited series of informal dialogues between friends and acquaintances. They are characterised by naturalness and their audio quality and marked-up using a schema which allows learners to retrieve features of spoken language, such as speaker intention, formulaicity and prosodic characteristics such as speed of delivery. The requirement to combine audio assets and synchronous text animation has in the past necessitated the use of browser ‘plug-in’ technologies, such as Adobe Flash. Plug-in-based systems all suffer from major drawbacks. They are not installed by default on deployed browsers. More critically they obscure the underlying speech corpus structure. Also proprietary UIs offer no standard way of dealing with accessibility or dynamic interface reconfiguration, e.g. moving from corpus playback to concordance views. This makes design of a unified interface framework, with audio playback, synchronous text and speech, more difficult. Given the profusion of plug-in architectures and plug-in types, it is clear that such an environment is unsustainable for building tools for speech corpus visualisation. In order to overcome these challenges, FLUENT drew heavily on the HTML5 specification coupled with a user-centred design for L2 learners to specify and develop scalable, reusable and accessible UIs for many devices.This paper describes the design of the corpus schema and its close integration with the UI model

Dialogic Fluency - Why it Matters

Speech as an LSP: Many dialogues presented to language learners could be better described as ‘interleaved mini-monologues’, their purpose being to provide examples of grammatical sentences in realistic settings. Real dialogues, on the other hand, are worked out ‘live’, with neither speaker knowing in detail where the conversation will lead. Speaker interaction is marked to a large extent by prosody and often even good communicators sound disfluent if their half of the dialogue is judged in isolation. Dialogic fluency: The objective of dialoguing L1 speakers, however, is to realise a social or personal goal, with language only part of effective communication. Possibly the bulk of the communication devolves to prosody, shared knowledge and body language. Whereas this might not be a mainstream production goal for language learners, all users of English as an international language likely to come into contact with native speakers should be sensitised to native-speaker prosody. Influence of live dialogue on speech production: Given that the aim of an L1-L1 dialogue is not to provide learners with sample sentences, but rather to use language as a key factor in a social encounter, learners need a tool which will allow them to study the interaction of real dialogues. Of particular interest is the turn-taking behaviour of speakers, which is often flagged prosodically and produces utterances which, on the surface seem disfluent, but which on further analysis are seen to have an interactive function. The production of such a tool is the aim of the Dynamic Speech Corpus (DSC)

Dexrazoxane for Preventing Anthracycline Cardiotoxicity in Children with Solid Tumors

This study attempted to assess the incidence and outcome of anthracycline cardiotoxicity and the role of dexrazoxane as a cardioprotectant in childhood solid tumors. The dexrazoxane group included 47 patients and the control group of historical cohort included 42. Dexrazoxane was given in the 10:1 ratio to doxorubicin. Fractional shortening and systolic and diastolic left ventricular diameters were used to assess the cardiac function. The median follow-ups were 54 months in the dexrazoxane group and 86 months in the control group. The mean cumulative doses of doxorubicin were 280.8±83.4 mg/m2 in the dexrazoxane group and 266.1±75.0 mg/m2 in the control group. The dexrazoxane group experienced significantly fewer cardiac events (27.7% vs. 52.4%) and less severe congestive heart failure (6.4% vs. 14.3%) than the control group. Thirteen cardiotoxicities including one cardiac death and 2 congestive heart failures occurred in the dexrazoxane group, and 22 cardiotoxicities including 2 cardiac deaths and 4 congestive heart failures, in the control group. Five year cardiac event free survival rates were 69.2% in the dexrazoxane group and 45.8% in the control group (P=0.04). Dexrazoxane reduces the incidence and severity of early and late anthracycline cardiotoxicity in childhood solid tumors

Towards Efficient Spectral Converters through Materials Design for Luminescent Solar Devices.

Single-junction photovoltaic devices exhibit a bottleneck in their efficiency due to incomplete or inefficient harvesting of photons in the low- or high-energy regions of the solar spectrum. Spectral converters can be used to convert solar photons into energies that are more effectively captured by the photovoltaic device through a photoluminescence process. Here, recent advances in the fields of luminescent solar concentration, luminescent downshifting, and upconversion are discussed. The focus is specifically on the role that materials science has to play in overcoming barriers in the optical performance in all spectral converters and on their successful integration with both established (e.g., c-Si, GaAs) and emerging (perovskite, organic, dye-sensitized) cell types. Current challenges and emerging research directions, which need to be addressed for the development of next-generation luminescent solar devices, are also discussed.This work was supported by the Science Foundation Ireland under Grant No. 12/IP/1608