{"id":1566,"date":"2009-08-10T18:01:55","date_gmt":"2009-08-11T01:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tesl-ej.org\/wordpress\/?page_id=1566"},"modified":"2009-08-10T18:41:14","modified_gmt":"2009-08-11T01:41:14","slug":"ej42int","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/tesl-ej.org\/wordpress\/issues\/volume11\/ej42\/ej42int\/","title":{"rendered":"Text-to-Speech Applications Used in EFL Contexts to Enhance Pronunciatio"},"content":{"rendered":"

September 2007 — Volume 11, Number 2<\/h3>\n

On the Internet<\/h3>\n

Text-to-Speech Applications Used in EFL Contexts to Enhance Pronunciation<\/b><\/h3>\n

 <\/b><\/p>\n

Dafne González
<\/b>Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, Venezuela<\/b><\/p>\n

Introduction<\/b><\/p>\n

Helping EFL students with their pronunciation is a difficult task faced by most teachers in EFL contexts. Too many students in the classroom, few teaching hours a week and lack of language input are just a few of all the obstacles encountered by EFL teachers.<\/p>\n

Increased access to the Internet and to the free Web 2.0 tools available on the Web provides teachers with many alternatives to help them face these problems. Teachers can now create all kinds of resources to provide varied input and have them easily accessible for their students. Readings, videos, Power Point presentations, podcasts, and images, can all be made available at any time on the Internet, and some can even be downloaded for offline access. Furthermore, there are many sites where teachers can find ready-made materials to teach and have students practice their listening, reading, writing and speaking skills, including grammar and vocabulary exercises. However, helping a large number of students with their pronunciation when there is not enough time to monitor each student during class time remains a problem. Having students record and send the recordings to the teacher is a good idea, but it is time consuming for the teacher, and it will not provide immediate feedback to the students. Furthermore, students will tend to rely only on the teacher, which is not ideal if we want to promote autonomous learners who do not need to be rushing to their teachers to check the pronunciation of each word they want to utter. Is there a way to solve this problem? <\/p>\n

Text-to-speech (TTS) applications found on the Internet can be incorporated to our lessons to help students listen to any written text to check its pronunciation and intonation. In this article we will describe some text-to-speech applications freely available on the Web and how they can be used in EFL courses.  <\/p>\n

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Text<\/td>\n

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Speech<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

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What are Text-to-speech applications?<\/b><\/p>\n

TTS applications are sound synthesis (computer generated simulation of human speech) tools that convert written text to sound. Originally, these applications were created for blind people. An intelligible text-to-speech program allows people with visual impairments or reading disabilities to listen to written works on a home computer. Many computer operating systems have included speech synthesizers since the early 1980s. Nowadays, they are offered for commercial use, to promote commercial Web sites; for example, Site Pal <http:\/\/www.sitepal.com<\/a>>. <\/p>\n

For more information, see the Wikipedia articles on:<\/i><\/p>\n