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Publication
Looking for a mobile app to improve pronunciation in European Portuguese
| Name: | Description: | Size: | Format: | |
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| 1.91 MB | Adobe PDF |
Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
A means to meet the pronunciation desired outcomes of diverse learners is to encourage them to use computer-assisted pronunciation training (e.g., O’Brien, 2018), especially tools allowing their learning to become more autonomous, accessible, ‘on-the-move’, and adjusted to their personal goals and needs. The mobile apps exhibit all these affordances and can even be designed to respond to challenges of specific learners’ groups in a more direct way (for instance, the difficulty in voicing contrasts in the case of Chinese Mandarin L1 – European Portuguese (EP) L2 – e.g., Oliveira, 2020). However, the mobile apps proposed for pronunciation training should present not only the general properties of a good language learning tool, but also the specific research-based requirements for pronunciation learning and teaching.
This paper aims at observing the level of adjustment to the requirements for pronunciation learning and teaching in the available apps for EP. A corpus of ten promising apps is constituted, after using several inclusion criteria (e.g., English as the vehicular language to learn EP, availability of a free version with daily unlimited time of use). These are then analyzed according to a framework created for this study and based on key ideas proposed in Kukulske-Hulme (2021), the Framework for Language Learning App Evaluation by Rosell-Aguilar (2017), and the Framework for pronunciation teaching presented in Castelo (2022). Among the main findings from this analysis, it is possible to highlight: (1) the inexistence of an app with all the needed properties for pronunciation learning; (2) the identification of the three most useful mobile apps to learn the EP pronunciation (despite their limitations); (3) the listing of the main aspects to consider/improve when designing apps for this purpose in the future.
Description
1ª Conferência Internacional "Language MOOCs e OERs", realizada na Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, de 7-8 de outubro de 2022.
Keywords
Pronunciation teaching Mobile-assisted language learning Portuguese as a Foreign Language App evaluation
Citation
Castelo, A. (2022). Looking for a mobile app to improve pronunciation in European Portuguese. First International Conference Language MOOCs and OERs: new trends and challenges (Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, Porto, 7-8/10/2022).