An Empirical Study Of The Effectiveness Of Praat-assisted Pronunciation Learning With Visual Feedback For Chinese L2 Learners

Based on related studies abroad and home,L2 learners' pronunciation learning awareness,received feedback,and individual difference in perception and recognition ability may be the factors affecting their improvement in L2 pronunciation and need more attention.Combining with the development of modern educational technology,this research is to study the effectiveness of Praat-assisted pronunciation learning with audio + visual feedback in fact.Through a two-week quasi-experiment,this research collected data mainly by the micro-speech experiment(including the pretest,three interventions,the delayed post test),rating scores from three native raters,surveys and a semi-structured interview,thus proposing to answer the following questions:After Praat-assisted pronunciation learning with visual feedback,have the subjects improved their scores in global,segmental,word stress,intonation and speech rate? If any,is there any difference in terms of four rating sentences?The main findings of this research are as follows:Firstly,by comparing test results before and after the interventions with Praat-assisted pronunciation learning method,obvious and significant improvement in global,word stress,intonation and speech rate aspects were found generally,except segmental item.The features of Prrat-assisted pronunciation learning method and the influence of L1 may be the factors for no obvious improvement in segmental.Besides,there exists individual difference in the pronunciation improvement.Secondly,after the Praat-assisted pronunciation learning with visual feedback,subjects' performance in the delay post test is different among four rating sentences and phonological items.Subjects got more improvement in rating sentence S3(Were you at the party last night?)than other sentences,but the least improvement in segmental item for four rating sentences.Different learning attention and efforts for four rating sentences,the features of Praat-assisted pronunciation learning,different sentence difficulty levels may be the reasons according to the interview data.Finally,based on learners' survey and interview result,Praat-assisted pronunciation learning method with visual feedback has a positive effect for them.Besides,pronunciation learning with visual feedback is more helpful for intonation and speech rate learning,while segmental learning mainly depends on their auditory feedback.This research enriches the contents of Praat-assisted pronunciation learning with visual feedback.At the same time,it has a certain enlightening effect on future related speech research.