Govt. Degree College, Narsipatnam
Department of English
Title: Audiovisual text-to-speech mode of teaching for imparting cognitive skills to students.
Objectives of the Practice: To impart listening, reading and speaking skills to students.
The Context: Students are found to be passive learners while using the conventional chalk and talk method of teaching. There is a heterogeneous group of students in every class, and students are found to be bereft of cognitive skills. Mere completion of the syllabus to make the student exam ready doesn’t suffice. So the department has taken an initiative to devise a digital presentation of the syllabus by using two free software i.e. Audio bookmaker and Freecam to make the classroom an interactive one.
The Practice: The central idea of this practice is to make the classroom a student-centric one. The text-to-speech software delivers the content of the lesson with perfect pronunciation and thus phonetics is learnt by the student subconsciously. There is a need for the students to acquire all the LSRW skills simultaneously. The text-to-speech presentations designed by the department of English, Narsipatnam prove to be beneficial to students by making them efficient listeners, readers, speakers and writers. This method operates in following components-
- Listening: The text-to-speech presentation acts as a stimulus to slow learners who find difficulty in listening and comprehending the English language. Most of the passive listeners in the classroom become active listeners since the text is read by the software by highlighting the sentences in the content.
- Speaking: To be able to speak, one needs a mastery in uttering sounds which comes under the branch of language studies i.e. “Phonetics”. The teacher may falter sometimes in delivering the content with phonetic accuracy, but the text-to-speech software delivers the text with phonetic accuracy. The subconscious mind of the student is trained to utter sounds of English accurately and express their sentences with proper intonation.
- Reading: Since reading requires regular practice Most of the students are averse to reading. The text-to-speech software comes in handy to those students who find reading a herculean task. It doesn’t demand any effort from the learner. The learner just watches the sentences being highlighted by the software in consonance with the speech and comprehends the meaning of the sentence and also the central idea of the topic presented.
- Writing: The student who has developed all the three skills namely, Listening, Speaking, and Reading is now ready to understand and analyze the sentence structures and thereby attempts to frame the sentences on his own and present it on the paper without making any punctuation errors.
Evidence of Success: In the beginning of the implementation of this practice, most of the students who were passive learners in the classroom tend to show curiosity towards learning and became active learners. Considerable increase in confidence levels is seen in some students. Through this method, E.Nageswari of B.Sc. (M.P.C) became an eloquent speaker in English and had won 3rd prize in state-level elocution competition conducted by Rajahmundry Govt. Degree College (Autonomous). Her achievement stands as an evidence of success of this practice.
Problems Encountered and Resources Required: Since the students are not used to listen and comprehend native English pronunciation, there was an initial friction in learning process. It took time for the students to catch up with the pace of speech delivery by the software. The teacher’s role is confined to a mere facilitator. The Department relied on free software like Audio book maker and Freecam. Internet resources have been extensively used to create MS Word files of the content.
