SLIM prosodic automatic tools for self-learning instruction

Abstract We present the Prosodic Module of a courseware for computer-assisted foreign language learning called SLIM – an acronym for Multimedia Interactive Linguistic Software, developed at the University of Venice (see Delmonte et al., 1999a,b). The Prosodic Module has been created in order to deal with the problem of improving a student's performance both in the perception and production of prosodic aspects of spoken language activities. It is composed of two different sets of Learning Activities, the first one dealing with phonetic and prosodic problems at word level and at segmental level – where segmental refers to syllable-sized segments; the second one dealing with prosodic aspects at phonological phrase and utterance suprasegmental level. The main goal of Prosodic Activities is to ensure consistent and pedagogically sound feedback to the student intending to improve his/her pronunciation in a foreign language. We argue that the use of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) as Teaching Aid should be under-utilized and should be targeted to narrowly focussed spoken exercises, disallowing open-ended dialogues, in order to ensure consistency of evaluation. In addition, we argue that ASR alone cannot be used to gauge Goodness of Pronunciation (GOP), being inherently inadequate for that goal. On the contrary, we support the conjoined use of ASR technology and prosodic tools to produce GOP useable for linguistically consistent and adequate feedback to the student.