Mining education, including ESL teaching had to undergo a sudden switch to the distance learning mode in spring 2020 due to COVID-19. The article analyses the challenges that most of teachers had to face and justifies the term “extreme learning” in connection with a sudden shift to a distance mode in higher education world-wide. The analytical data is provided to prove the point and as an effort to evaluate the effectiveness of extreme online learning. Current situation in Russian mining universities can be compared with the results of transition to emergency online format in the United States, UNM University. The necessity for further assessment is underlined in connection with the analysis of prerequisites, needs, and processes rather than the results.
The formation of global competences for learners at all levels of professional engineering and mining education as the basis for the successful career and social life has become increasingly urgent in modern fast-changing world. The solution to this problem involves several aspects: first, identification and description of the basic elements and the structure of the global competences within the competency-based approach; second, the interpretation of global competences and their components taking into account convergent and divergent global processes in all spheres of human activity. Third, the development of tools to facilitate the reform of education, to ensure the quality improvement of the educational process, procedures, evaluation of results and ensuring the growth of quality indicators of the results of education.
Acoustic analyses of recordings of read speech were used to compare the production of lexical stress in multisyllabic words by Spanish ESL (English as a Second Language) speakers to that of native English speakers. The participants read short sentences containing multi-syllabic target words for which syllable duration, intensity, and fundamental frequency in the pronunciations of stressed and unstressed syllables were compared. Target words were equally divided based on syllable count, the syllable that should receive lexical stress based on native English pronunciation, and Spanish/English cognate status. Both orthographically identical cognates (e.g., radio) and orthographically non-identical cognates (e.g., necessary/necesario) were included. Average values of syllable duration, intensity and fundamental frequency were recorded across the speaker groups, and effects of cognate status on production were noted. Target words pronounced by the native speakers (to avoid differing segmental factors) were then resynthesized using the PSOLA algorithm to simulate the acoustic patterns of the ESL speakers. Native English listeners were asked to rate a set of stimuli embedded in a carrier phrase for intelligibility and accentedness. Results of the listening tasks suggest that variations in the acoustic properties under investigation may impact a listeners perception of speech intelligibility and accentedness.
The degree to which prosodic features related to English lexical stress affect the perception of factors such as intelligibility and accentedness by native English listeners was investigated. Acoustic analyses of English multi-syllabic words spoken by native Spanish speakers who learned English as a second language (ESL) were used to determine the values of the acoustic correlates of lexical stress of these speakers on a set of target words. Values for vowel duration, intensity, and fundamental frequency produced by the Spanish ESL speakers were compared to those values produced by native English speakers. Prosodic variation observed in the ESL speakers was used to formulate a range for manipulations to the target words. To focus solely on prosody and not take into account consonant and vowel quality, manipulations, using the PSOLA algorithm in Praat, were done to the voices of native English speakers. These manipulations captured increases and decreases in duration, intensity, and fundamental frequency on vowels that should or should not carry lexical stress in a particular target word. Listeners rated the resynthesized tokens for factors such as intelligibility and accentedness, and the results suggest that a speaker’s prosody alone can influence a native listener’s judgments on these variables.
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