An Authoring System for Editing Lessons in Phonetic English in SMIL3.0
This work addresses the problem of English pronunciation teaching for French learners, but it is incremental as it applies existing dual-coding methods to a specific educational context.
The authors tackled the difficulty of teaching English prosody, particularly stress, to French learners by developing SaCoPh, an authoring system for creating multimedia courses based on a dual-coding approach, which resulted in a tool that leverages SMIL 3.0 for web publication.
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.