I N D U S T R Y I N S I G H T
HOW TO USE EDTECH AND MAKE SURE EDTECH DOESN’ T USE YOU
Richard Howeson has founded and run language learning company, uTalk, for more than 30 years and seen firsthand the pros and cons of using technology in education. The company’ s app, also called uTalk, gives beginners the choice of more than 150 languages to learn. Howeson discusses the use of automatic speech recognition and where he thinks EdTech works best.
A s the boss of a language learning company, I’ m often asked about automatic speech recognition( ASR) – one of the standout developments of interactive tech – which we have absolutely no plans to use.
This is despite the fact that many other language learning apps use ASR to give learners feedback on their pronunciation.
The problem is that ASR is not accurate 100 % of the time and sometimes tells you that you’ ve got something right when you’ ve got it wrong and vice versa.
It can also struggle to understand accents and if, like us, you have 150 + different languages including, for instance, five different varieties of Arabic, that’ s a big deal.
So we looked carefully at ASR when we were designing our apps( and we still closely monitor it) but what we found worked best was the same high-tech piece of kit that helped us learn our first language: the human ear. So, in the uTalk app, learners listen to native speaker audio in their target language, record themselves copying it and then compare the two and mark their efforts with a tick or a cross. Perhaps counter-intuitively, we’ ve also found that learners are more likely to be hard on themselves rather than overly generous when it comes to self-marking.
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