An Empirical Study Of The Effectiveness Of ASR-based CAPT On The Phoneme Teaching For Chinese Non-English Majors

As the material base of the language, pronunciation plays an essential role in mastering the language skills and acquiring the knowledge of a language. Studying English must begin with grasping the correct English pronunciation. Therefore, Pronunciation teaching is significant to the EFL teaching. Phoneme teaching is the most important component of the pronunciation teaching, which is often taught as a separate part. As the smallest unit of pronunciation, the grasp of phoneme is critical to the pronunciation learning, and has an influence on enhancing listening and speaking ability, furthermore, the unfavorable command of the phoneme even dampens the users’self-confidence, which shows the significance of phoneme learning. However, the current situation of non-English majors’phoneme teaching is unpromising. Because of the over-crowed classroom, constraints form the regular curriculum and the traditional classroom-based teaching setting, there is not enough emphasis on the phoneme teaching in the English lesson, even no phoneme teaching at all. Thus, numerous researchers have attempted to explore the effective and practical teaching and training methods to improve the phoneme teaching for non-English majors.Over the past decade, with the widely application of the computer technology to all aspects of foreign language teaching, more and more Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) courseware has emerged. Especially, with the integration of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology, it is possible for the CAPT courseware to provide the individualized practices and real-time feedback for the English learners. Many studies have evidenced that segmenting an utterance in phonemes so that feedback can be provided at phoneme level is one of the main advantages of the ASR technology. However, there are still doubts about the effectiveness and stability of the ASR-based CAPT software. Thus, more scientific and empirical researches are still needed to examine the effectiveness of the ASR-based CAPT software on improving users’segmental proficiency.One of the ASR-based CAPT software-MyET was employed in this study. The author attempted to make an empirical study to examine MyET’s effectiveness on the phoneme teaching for Chinese Non-English majors. Two groups of students coming from Shandong Agricultural University were divided into the experimental group and the control group. Firstly, two groups were asked to answer the questionnaire I in order to have a whole picture of the current situation of Chinese non-English majors’phoneme study. Then two groups took part in the pretest, and the result of the pretest showed that the experimental group and the control group had the equivalent phonetic competence. After the pretest, the experimental group received the phoneme training in the form of the combination of the traditional teacher-led instruction and students’ autonomic training through the ASR-based CAPT software MyET, while the control group only received the phonetic instruction in the way of traditional teacher-led instruction. After the phonetic training, two groups participated in the posttest with the same stimuli as the pretest. Moreover, participants in the experimental group were asked to answer the Questionnaire II and six students selected from the experimental group joined the interview.The data of the pretest and the posttest of the two groups were analyzed by SPSS17.0. The result of the analysis indicated that the two groups both made the significant progress in segmental competence, but the experimental group outperformed greatly than the control group and the improvement of the two groups were significantly different. That is to say, the traditional teacher-led instruction assisted with students’ autonomic training through the ASR-based CAPT software MyET is a more effective approach to improve non-English majors’segmental quality compared with the traditional teacher-led phoneme teaching. Furthermore, the data from the questionnaire II and the interview showed that the majority of participants in the experimental group hold the highly positive attitude towards the ASR-based CAPT, and provided some suggestions on the design of the MyET and the future implication of ASR-based Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training.The result of the study showed that ASR-based Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training is an effective approach to improve the Chinese Non-English Majors’segmental proficiency. According to the current phoneme teaching situation for Non-English Majors, Chinese universities should integrate the ASR-based CAPT courses into the traditional English classroom teaching in order to enhance students’pronunciation skills. The study also provided some constructive implications for the designing improvement of the ASR-based CAPT software and pedagogical implications for the future computer assisted pronunciation teaching and learning.