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Spectrographic analysis and patterns in pronunciation

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Abstract

Though there are good reasons to improve instruction in pronunciation, the teaching of pronunciation has lost popularity among language teachers. This is because the traditional indirect analyses of sounds according to places and manners of articulation are clumsy when applied to classroom teaching. By shifting the focus of instruction to the direct feedback of real-time acoustic analysis in the visual mode, instructors are free from the complex and often unproductive terminology of articulatory phonetics, and students are free from the burden of translating instructors' general comments such as “try again” or “repeat after me” into plans for specific changes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Coordinator of Computer Assisted Instruction, English Department, West Chester University, 547 Main Hall, 19383, West Chester, PA, USA

    Garry Molholt

Authors
  1. Garry Molholt
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Garry Molholt is Assistant Professor of Linguistics and English as a Second Language, and Coordinator of Computer Assisted Instruction. His research interests are the applications of speech processing to instruction in the acquisition of second language phonology. He has published “Computer Assisted Instruction in Pronunciation for Chinese Speakers of American English,” in TESOL Quarterly, and (with Ari Presler), “Correlation between Human and Machine Ratings of Test of Spoken English Reading Passages,” in Technology and Language Testing.

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Molholt, G. Spectrographic analysis and patterns in pronunciation. Comput Hum 24, 81–92 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00115030

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