Category: Language and Technology
Storytelling with Multi-media Technologies
Storytelling is considered one of the most effective ways for teaching a foreign language, and it enables learners to build greater confidence in their target language fluency through improving their presentational skills. Furthermore, storytelling sparks learners’ curiosity about the target culture while stimulating learners’ creative thinking and active learning processes. This paper investigates how the …
Role of Learners’ Subjective Difficulty Rating Toward a System for Practicing English-Speaking
This preliminary study on how to develop a system for English-speaking practices explores the role a subjective difficulty rating should play in such a system, using a questionnaire and a level-based vocabulary list. By selecting 75 English verbs from the five difficulty levels in the list, 72 Japanese university students rated the difficulty of answering …
How the Acoustic Correlates of English Obstruents Appear in Multivariate Analysis
It will be argued that multivariate analysis of acoustic natures of speech can provide insight into English phonology. Our recent analyses of spectral changes of speech demonstrated that one extracted factor, the “mid-low factor”, with high factor loadings around 1100 Hz, was strongly associated with vowels, and to a lesser degree with sonorant consonants. The …
Virtual Reality for Language Learning
Technology can provide new opportunities for learning, and virtual reality (VR) is a new modality with great potential for immersive and interactive learning experiences. VR is engaging and can spark wonder in learners of all ages. However, we don’t yet know how much or in what ways VR can support learning a new language. The …