Co-presenter Biographies

Okim Kang is a Professor in the Applied Linguistics Program at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA. Her research interests are speech production and perception, L2 pronunciation and intelligibility, L2 oral assessment and testing, automated scoring and speech recognition, World Englishes, and language attitude.

John H.L. Hansen, serves as Associate Dean for Research, and Professor of Electrical Engineering, and Speech & Hearing Sciences at Univ. of Texas at Dallas (UTDallas). He oversees the Center for Robust Speech Systems (CRSS-UTDallas), and serves as ISCA President. He is an ISCA Fellow, IEEE Fellow, and past Technical Advisor for NATO. He has supervised 89 PhD/MS candidates, and author/co-author 752 journal/conference papers in the field of speech processing and language technology.

Dr. Helmer Strik is Associate Professor in Speech Science and Technology at Radboud University Nijmegen, co-founder and CSO of NovoLearning, and Chair of the ISCA SIG ‘Speech and Language Technology in Education’ (SLaTE). His research addresses spoken dialogue systems, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and their use in e-Learning and e-Health.

 Dr. Catia Cucchiarini is Principal Investigator at the Centre for Language and Speech Technology of the Radboud University Nijmegen and Senior Consultant at The Dutch Language Union in the Hague.  She conducts research on speech processing, language learning, and speech technology applications in Computer Assisted Language Learning and e-health.  ​

Keelan Evanini (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is a Research Director at Educational Testing Service. He directs the research team that develops SpeechRater, the ETS capability for automated spoken language assessment. His research interests include automated assessment of non-native spoken English, feedback in computer-assisted language learning applications, and spoken dialog systems.

Abstract

Integrating international teaching assistants (ITAs) into teaching at U.S. universities constitutes various opportunities for fostering internationalism on our campuses, but ITAs are often perceived not as opportune, but as problematic (Kang, 2012; Kang & Rubin, 2009), due to their limited ability of communicative interaction and their unintelligible speech (Lindemann & Subtirelu, 2013). To assist efforts in training ITAs for success during a global pandemic that requires physical distancing, a Mobile-Assisted Pronunciation Training (MAPT) is being developed for use in several institutions in the US. This presentation reports on the design of a five-unit MAPT ITA curriculum that promotes pronunciation, pragmatic, and presentation skills on an ASR-equipped mobile platform. Following guidance from corpus linguistics (e.g., AWL, ASWL, and MICASE) as well as synthetic research in using technology for pronunciation intervention (Mahdi & Al Khateeb, 2019), it focuses on levering resources for digitalization of empirically informed instruction and practice. The curriculum prioritizes phonological features important for communication through promoting intelligibility rather than accent reduction.[1]  Phonemes were chosen based on a functional load approach important to ITAs (Catford, 1987; Levis, 2018; Munro & Derwing, 2006). Suprasegmental features including stress and intonation were adapted from pedagogical materials (e.g., Grant et al., 2000; Celce-Murcia et al., 2010). Beyond pronunciation, the presentation will highlight the development of an avatar to simulate interaction and promote awareness of pragma-linguistic and prosodic choices important in speech acts an ITA may encounter (Belz, 2008 ; Smith et al., 2007). Finally, presentation skills are addressed through mapping communicative goals to the necessary grammar, lexicon, and phonology in open-ended speaking tasks. Attendees can expect to gain insight into resources and possibilities of MAPT instructional design as well as issues illuminated during piloting of the lessons.