The JALT CALL Journal
Vol. 1, No. 1, April 2005, pp. 39-47
 

Teaching English Pronunciation for Japanese Learners of English Online

Wang Shudong & Michael Higgins
Yamaguchi University, Japan

Yukiko Shima
Tokyo Science University in Yamaguchi, Japan

Abstract:

In this study, a compact but effective Internet-based support system was designed for Japanese English learners to improve their English pronunciation. The system provides several interactive methods for users not only to learn pronunciation from the sample data of native speakers, but also to discover and evaluate their own specific pronunciation problems, and then improve their pronunciation with the help of the system. The system is real-time, Internet based, and the pinpoint feedback from the system after it has analyzed the user’s input sounds, will appear in human teacher-like natural language, rather than impersonal scores or abstract bar graphs which appear in other systems. Our present system focuses on pronunciations that are often problematic for Japanese learners of English. During the process of designing the system, we embedded HMM/DMM speech recognition and speech synthesis modules.