The evaluation of educational software programs for English as a foreign language and/or second language pronunciation development

• Autor(a) principal: Cristiana Gomes de Freitas Menezes Martins
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFC
• Texto Completo: http://www.teses.ufc.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=14859
• topic: Ensino; LÃngua inglesa; Abordagem comunicativa; Teaching; English language; Communicative approach; LINGUAS ESTRANGEIRAS MODERNAS

The purpose of this study was to evaluate how well educational software programs teach English as a Foreign Language and/or Second Language (EFL/ESL) pronunciation following the principles of the Communicative Approach (CELCE-MURCIA et al., 2010). In the first stage of the research, a software program evaluation instrument was developed and validated. Forty-six EFL/ESL teachers used it to analyze an online version of the software program Pronunciation Power 2. The responses of the participants were submitted for statistical analysis. An ICC of 0.983 (zero point nine hundred eighty-three) for the responses indicated a high degree of correlation in the evaluation of the instrument items used by the participants. The results of the One-Way ANOVA also indicated that there was no significant difference (p> 0.05) in the evaluation of the items. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient obtained was 0.918 (zero point nine hundred and eighteen), indicating a high degree of internal consistency. The results of the factor analysis suggested grouping the instrument items into 5 (five) components that were arranged in the following order: 1. Content Design; 2. Pedagogical Design; 3. Assessment/Flexibility Design; 4. Multimedia Design; and 5. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Design. In the second stage of the research, the instrument was used to analyze 5 (five) EFL/ESL pronunciation teaching software programs available on the market. Regarding the items of the component Content Design, the analysis showed that only one software program obtained less than 50% (fifty percent) of the maximum rating, two programs obtained between 50 and 70% (fifty and seventy percent) and two other programs reached more than 80% (eighty percent) of the maximum rating. In the items of Pedagogical Design, all programs scored above 50% (fifty percent); three programs obtained between 50 and 70% (fifty and seventy percent) and two other programs obtained above 70% (seventy percent). The evaluation of the ASR Design indicated that the items for this component had minimum ratings in all programs - four software programs scored zero and only one program obtained 33.33% (thirty-three point thirty-three percent) of the maximum rating for this component. The component Assessment/Flexibility Design obtained less than 50% (fifty percent) of the maximum rating of all the group items, while the items for Multimedia Design achieved higher ratings in most programs. Two software programs obtained between 50 and 70% (fifty and seventy percent) and three scored above 70% (seventy percent). To sum up, the overall results indicate that only one software program obtained more than 75% (seventyfive percent) of the maximum rating on the instrument. The other four programs presented less than three-quarters of the necessary characteristics to potentially develop English pronunciation. Although these programs, by themselves, may not be able to develop EFL/ESL pronunciation satisfactorily, they can be used to enrich the teaching of EFL/ESL pronunciation.