Browsing by Author "Badache Linda"

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Innovations in Practical Pronunciation Teaching: A Case Study of the Department of English at Batna University. Doctorat thesis, (2019)Université de Batna 2.
(University of Batna 2, 4/14/2019) Badache Linda
This work aims at investigating a recent technology and exploring the ways by which it can be used to enhance pronunciation teaching and learning. This technology consists of speech analysis software which provides students with both visual and audio data and gives them an immediate and authentic feedback on their production using Pratt computer software of phonetic analysis. The hypothesis is that if students were introduced and trained using this technology, the training provided by these instruments would considerably improve their sound production. The research is based on a pilot study conducted at the Sorbonne University which was undertaken to implement this pronunciation teaching method by testing the effectiveness of using this computer based visual feedback systems to help students better and improve their pronunciation. To test the hypothesis, we opt for the use of different data gathering tools namely the questionnaire, the recording of students’ production and the teachers ‘interview. The first results show that Pratt can enable students to refine their pronunciation and remedy their errors. By having instant, visual and automatic feedback displayed in spectrograms, students are able to actually observe the errors that they might not otherwise notice through listening alone. The work also demonstrates that the training from Pratt is transferred to sound production as the students are able to produce the utterances more clearly and naturally in a subsequent reading task. The final results of this study show how teachers and students can benefit greatly from this free and readily available open source, educational software, which helps students, at least, gain confidence when they speak.