Classrooms and voice recognition applications in a foreign language teaching

摘要

The advantages of using Voice recognition software in a foreign language course to enhance speaking accuracy and fluency have been suggested in the literature (1,2). One of the difficulties faced with Voice recognition software is a "noise" around the speakers. In our campus, the normal class size is around 40 for one English course. This means is that the software has to recognize speaker's voice correctly among other speakers' "noise". In this study, we carried out several experiments in terms of the system and the devices of the classroom. We picked up two kinds of classroom. One is Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) room, a specialized classroom for foreign language learning, where there are wired individual PC and headphone with microphone for each student. The other classroom is a normal classroom, where tablet computers or mobile devices were utilized. Our expectation is that the rate of recognition should be better in CALL classrooms than that of normal classroom with tablet computers, since students use headphones and microphones in a CALL classroom. The results of our study indicated that this hypothesis was true only with sight significance. This paper suggests that it is still difficult to integrate Voice recognition software into normal classroom with local application with tablet PC.