The Digital Age and Speech Technology For Chinese Language Teaching and Learning

Living in the digital age, we have many tools available to us as language teachers and language learners, tools nonexistent even a generation or two earlier. Modern speech processing, using speech-analysis software running on personal computers and capable of accurately analyzing spoken language, dates from the invention in the 1940’s of the sound spectrograph, yet today is becoming increasingly useful for foreign-language teaching and learning, especially in the areas of pronunciation and fluency. This article, supported by illustrative screen-shots, introduces the use of such speech-analysis software—much of it freely downloadable from the Web—for examining the segmental and suprasegmental (prosodic) structures of modern spoken Chinese and for providing the student with aural-visual feedback.