PLAN: INTRODUCTION……………………………………..……………….………..…2

PRINCIPLES OF ASR TECHNOLOGY………………..……………….………..3

PERFORMANCE AND DESIGN ISSUES IN SPEECH APPLICATIONS……...7

CURRENT TRENDS IN VOICE-INTERACTIVE CALL………….…….………8

FUTURE TRENDS IN VOICE-INTERACTIVE CALL…….…..…………....…13

DEFINING AND ACQUIRING LITERACY IN THE AGE OF INFORMATION…………………………………….………………………..…..14

CONTENT-BASED INSTRUCTION AND LITERACY DEVELOPMENT…..15

THEORY INTO PRACTICE…………….……………………………………….17

CONCLUSION………………………………………………………...…………17

REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………18

INTRODUCTION

During the past two decades, the exercise of spoken language skills has received increasing attention among educators. Foreign language curricula focus on productive skills with special emphasis on communicative competence. Students' ability to engage in meaningful conversational interaction in the target language is considered an important, if not the most important, goal of second language education. This shift of emphasis has generated a growing need for instructional materials that provide an opportunity for controlled interactive speaking practice outside the classroom.

With recent advances in multimedia technology, computer-aided language learning (CALL) has emerged as a tempting alternative to traditional modes of supplementing or replacing direct student-teacher interaction, such as the language laboratory or audio-tape-based self-study. The integration of sound, voice interaction, text, video, and animation has made it possible to create self-paced interactive learning environments that promise to enhance the classroom model of language learning significantly. A growing number of textbook publishers now offer educational software of some sort, and educators can choose among a large variety of different products. Yet, the practical impact of CALL in the field of foreign language education has been rather modest. Many educators are reluctant to embrace a technology that still seeks acceptance by the language teaching community as a whole (Kenning & Kenning, 1990).

A number of reasons have been cited for the limited practical impact of computer-based language instruction. Among them are the lack of a unified theoretical framework for designing and evaluating CALL systems (Chapelle, 1997; Hubbard, 1988; Ng & Olivier, 1987); the absence of conclusive empirical evidence for the pedagogical benefits of computers in language learning (Chapelle, 1997; Dunkel, 1991; Salaberry, 1996); and finally, the current limitations of the technology itself (Holland, 1995; Warschauer, 1996). The rapid technological advances of the 1980s have raised both the expectations and the demands placed on the computer as a potential learning tool. Educators and second language acquisition (SLA) researchers alike are now demanding intelligent, user-adaptive CALL systems that offer not only sophisticated diagnostic tools, but also effective feedback mechanisms capable of focusing the learner on areas that need remedial practice. As Warschauer puts it, a computerized language teacher should be able to understand a user's spoken input and evaluate it not just for correctness but also for appropriateness. It should be able to diagnose a student's problems with pronunciation, syntax, or usage, and then intelligently decide among a range of options (e.g., repeating, paraphrasing, slowing down, correcting, or directing the student to background explanations). (Warschauer, 1996, p. 6)

Salaberry (1996) demands nothing short of a system capable of simulating the complex socio-communicative competence of a live tutor--in other words, the linguistic intelligence of a human--only to conclude that the attempt to create an "intelligent language tutoring system is a fallacy" (p. 11). Because speech technology isn't perfect, it is of no use at all. If it "cannot account for the full complexity of human language," why even bother modeling more constrained aspects of language use (Higgins, 1988, p. vii)? This sort of all-or-nothing reasoning seems symptomatic of much of the latest pedagogical literature on CALL. The quest for a theoretical grounding of CALL system design and evaluation (Chapelle, 1997) tends to lead to exaggerated expectations as to what the technology ought to accomplish. When combined with little or no knowledge of the underlying technology, the inevitable result is disappointment.

  PRINCIPLES OF ASR TECHNOLOGY

Consider the following four scenarios:

1.         A court reporter listens to the opening arguments of the defense and types the words into a steno-machine attached to a word-processor.

2.         A medical doctor activates a dictation device and speaks his or her patient's name, date of birth, symptoms, and diagnosis into the computer. He or she then pushes "end input" and "print" to produce a written record of the patient's diagnosis.

3.         A mother tells her three-year old, "Hey Jimmy, get me my slippers, will you?" The toddler smiles, goes to the bedroom, and returns with papa's hiking boots.

4.         A first-grader reads aloud a sentence displayed by an automated Reading Tutor. When he or she stumbles over a difficult word, the system highlights the word, and a voice reads the word aloud. The student repeats the sentence--this time correctly--and the system responds by displaying the next sentence.

At some level, all four scenarios involve speech recognition. ............