Torben Kruchov Madsen


2006

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Field Evaluation of a Single-Word Pronunciation Training System
Niels Ole Bernsen | Thomas K. Hansen | Svend Kiilerich | Torben Kruchov Madsen
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)

Many learning tasks require substantial skills training. Ideally, the student might benefit the most from having a human expert – a teacher or trainer – at hand throughout, but human expertise remains a scarce resource. The second-best solution could be to do skills training with a computer-based self-training system. This vision of the computer as tutor currently motivates increasing efforts world-wide, in all manner of fields, including that of computer-assisted language learning, or CALL. But, as pointed out by Hincks [2003], along with the growth of the CALL area comes a growing need for empirical evidence that CALL systems have a beneficial effect. This point is reiterated by Chapelle [2002] who defines the goal for Computer Assisted Second Language Research as the gathering of evidence for the effect of CALL and instructional design. This paper presents results of a field test of our pronunciation training system which enables immigrants and others to self-train their pronunciation skills of single Danish words.