An Authoring System for Editing Lessons in Phonetic English in SMIL3.0

TL;DR

This paper introduces SaCoPh, an authoring tool leveraging SMIL3.0 to create multimedia phonetics courses that enhance English pronunciation teaching through dual-coding of prosody features.

Contribution

It presents a novel authoring system that simplifies the creation of phonetics lessons using SMIL3.0, integrating auditory and visual cues for improved learning.

Findings

Supports multimedia course creation for phonetics teaching

Utilizes SMIL3.0 for web publication of lessons

Aims to improve pronunciation learning for French learners

Abstract

One of the difficulties of teaching English is the prosody, including the stress. French learners have difficulties to encode this information about the word because it is irrelevant for them. Therefore, they have difficulty to produce this stress when they speak that language. Studies in this area have concluded that the dual-coding approach (auditory and visual) of a phonetic phenomenon helps a lot to improve its perception and memorization for novice learners. The aim of our work is to provide English teachers with an authoring named SaCoPh for editing multimedia courses that support this approach. This course is based on a template that fits the educational aspects of phonetics, exploiting the features of version 3.0 of the standard SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) for the publication of this course on the web.