People learning to speak another language learn best by seeing someone speak, listening, imitating, correcting, and repeating. Reading along with text helps a lot.
Simultaneous speech, where the player speaks along with a model, integrated with rhythm and realtime responses to the learner’s expressive messages, adds a new and critically important component to current language instruction.
Language educators agree that immediate feedback about students’ spoken language is an essential component of language instruction. Currently, none of the interactive device provide students with immediate feedback about their spoken language.
Ideally, language training delivered by computer should enable students to learn by listening, repeating, speaking, providing evaluative and corrective feedback, without an instructor being present. A system that can train speech and then help students to use correct pronunciation in context would be very desirable.
Speech technology should free instructors from most of the repetitive correction of students’ pronunciation, grammar, syntax, and choice of vocabulary. Integrated into existing training systems, this feature could significantly increase the rate and efficiency of English, foreign language, literacy, and many other types of instruction.
It is obvious that students learning a new language need to practice verbal expression. Many diligent students of English have good reading and writing ability, but many have not acquired correct pronunciation of the English phonemes, and of combining the accurately in conversation.
As a former teacher of English to Japanese students and business people here in Los Angeles and through my video courseware, I have seen this visual phonetic system proven over two decades of use to enable anyone who follows the methods to acquire and to deliver correct pronunciation of the sounds of English in context.
Is there a Karaoke in the house?