Effect of Animated Graphic Annotations and Immediate Visual Feedback in Aiding Japanese Pronunciation Learning

Abstract

This study examines the effectiveness of imagery and electronic visual feedback in facilitating students' acquisition of Japanese pronunciation skills. The independent variables, animated graphic annotation (AGA) and immediate visual feedback (IVF) were integrated into a Japanese computer-assisted language learning (JCALL) program focused on the pronunciation of specific word pairs. Students enrolled in an elementary Japanese course in Malaysia were randomly divided into three groups and used three different versions of the program: (a) text + sound, (b) text + audio + AGA, and (c) text + audio + IVF. The results of the study showed that students in the text + audio + AGA group significantly outperformed students in the text + audio only group in pretest-posttest improvement in learning the pronunciation of (a) akusento 'pitch' words, (b) seion 'voiceless' and dakuon 'voiced' words and (c) tanon 'short vowel,' chouon 'long vowel,' and sokuon 'geminate consonants' words. Students in the text + audio +IVF group significantly outperformed students in the text + audio only group in learning akusento words and seion and dakuon words. There were no significant differences between the AGA and IVF groups.

Transfer of suprasegmental improvements to novel sentences and segmental accuracy using real time audiovisual pitch training

“…Nonetheless, while the EXP group outperformed the CAD group in most pretest-posttest ratings, it is important to address the fact that the CAD group unexpectedly fared better than the EXP group in the suprasegmental category. This is inconsistent with previous research regarding the widely established benefits of real time audiovidual feedback and input over an auditory-only input (Weltens & de Bot, 1984;Hew & Ohki, 2004;Chun, Hardison, & Pennington, 2008).…”

“…While early work focused more on native models rather than on feedback (Anderson-Hsieh, 1992;Leather, 1990;Molholt, 1988;Pennington & Esling, 1996), current trends in intonation training using CAPT consists of (a) an audiovisual display of the speech feature; (b) an audiovisual display of a native speaker for comparison; and (c) a re-recording on the part of the learner in an attempt to match the native-speaker productions (Olson, 2014). These features were reported to not only aid learners in hearing their errors, but also in visualizing these errors to much reported success in sentence-level speech (Hardison, 2004;Hew & Ohki, 2004;Hirata, 2004;Pennington, Ellis, Lau, Lee & Lock, 2002) and discourse-level speech (Levis & Pickering, 2004). In line with the findings from Hardison (2004) and Hirata (2004), Hew and Ohki (2004) examined the effectiveness of imagery and immediate visual feedback in facilitating students' awareness and acquisition of the pronunciation of specific Japanese word pairs.…”

“…These features were reported to not only aid learners in hearing their errors, but also in visualizing these errors to much reported success in sentence-level speech (Hardison, 2004;Hew & Ohki, 2004;Hirata, 2004;Pennington, Ellis, Lau, Lee & Lock, 2002) and discourse-level speech (Levis & Pickering, 2004). In line with the findings from Hardison (2004) and Hirata (2004), Hew and Ohki (2004) examined the effectiveness of imagery and immediate visual feedback in facilitating students' awareness and acquisition of the pronunciation of specific Japanese word pairs. Using a pretestposttest design, all participants (n = 44) took a Japanese pronunciation test consisting of 15 Japanese word pairs.…”

Singing and arts activities in support of foreign language learning: an exploratory study

“…One study showed that a group of students who were taught Spanish with additional audiovisual aids had significantly higher performance in vocabulary and listening comprehension tests, but not in grammatical structure tests (Snyder & Colon, 1988). In addition, the pronunciation of vocabulary pairs in beginning-level FL Japanese students was improved through electronic feedback that included a combination of text, audio and visual information (Hew & Ohki, 2004). A recent research synthesis showed that animated visual aids, particularly video recordings reinforcing the content to be learned, were most beneficial (Höffler & Leutner, 2007).…”

Visual Emphasis of Lip Protrusion for Pronunciation Learning

“…According to [2], the simplest application just works as a digital recorder; learners can record their own pronunciations for comparison with a native speaker's. A step further than a digital recorder is the use of speech visualisation, for instance, waveforms, spectrograms, formant frequencies, pitches, contours and so on, as seen in [7]. A more sophisticated application can be achieved by employing automatic speech recognition (ASR).…”