Mike MacAdam (2009)

New web-based tool for developing skills and understanding skills when learning another language (2009)

There is a wealth of technology choices for learning and teaching the skills of reading and writing. Books, paper, pens, printing presses, word processors, and websites allow teachers to assign learning activities, evaluate the students’ work and assign new activities. Publishers also provide useful learning material. This isn’t the case for skills of speaking and understanding language where the dominant “technology” is a blackboard and the teacher’s voice. Most students can’t practice skills outside the classroom. This may be one of the main reasons why students have difficulty developing good speaking and understanding skills when learning another language. The free Chuala  (pronounced koala) website is the equivalent of a “Wikipedia for pronunciation” that allows users to login and record pronunciation examples in any of the 7,589 languages in the ISO 639 standard for language names. Name and geography information can also be added to specify accents, e.g. Acadian PEI French or American Midwest English. Translations can be added in any language and the resulting pronunciation examples can be grouped into lessons and courses.

Teaching and learning pronunciation skills is fundamentally changed when teachers and students have access to a free tool that automates the repetitive work required to develop good pronunciation and understanding skills. This presentation will identify some of the problems associated with developing good pronunciation and understanding skills. Some teaching and learning strategies based primarily on the deliberate practice methodology proposed by Anders Ericsson will be identified. Directions for future research in this area will be presented and discussed.

Mike MacAdam has a BSc (Physics) from UPEI and two degrees from Université Laval; a Master's in Instructional Practice and a teaching diploma. He also has a diploma from the National Coaching Institute in Victoria. Mike is President and Co-founder of Extemporel Inc. His Master's thesis included the development of a computerized system for evaluating the events that occur during basketball games. 

His research has been greatly influenced by Jean Brunelle, one of his faculty advisors at Université Laval, and Daryl Siedentop of Ohio State University. He has been working in the area of language acquisition, with a focus on developing pronunciation and understanding skills, since 1999. The goal is to develop tools to help authors and publishers develop interactive pronunciation courses that can be made available to mass markets. As part of this project, Extemporel has developed tools for researchers to facilitate fundamental research in language acquisition.