Abstract

With limited classroom time (Collins & Muñoz, 2016), teachers struggle to provide personalized language input (listening activities) and opportunities for students to practice output (speaking). Text-to-speech synthesizers (TTS), also known as text readers, offer a possible solution by allowing students to interact with the computer anytime-anywhere, and at their own pace (Cardoso, 2022). As such, this technology has the potential to improve students' listening skills and provide flexible language practice (Little, 1995). Although TTS offers many benefits (e.g., immediate access to the language; Liakin et al., 2017), an unresolved issue is that the technology does not incorporate an output-inducing component (Fang, 2017). To address this issue and contribute to the field of computer-assisted pronunciation instruction, this study combines TTS with shadowing (i.e., the repetition of a word or phrases immediately after hearing it; Lambert, 1994), a technique that has been proven to be effective in developing L2 pronunciation (Foote & McDonough, 2017; Zajdler, 2020). By combining these two technologies, to which we will refer as “TTS-based shadowing training” (TTS-S henceforth), our approach provides learners with the benefits of both TTS (exposure to input) and shadowing (opportunities to practice output).

To determine the probability of success of this innovative approach, this study examined the pedagogical effectiveness of using TTS-S in a self-regulated learning environment to acquire tones #1 and #4 in Mandarin Chinese. While tone #1 (high tone) is relatively easy to acquire in comparison with other tones, tone #4 (descending tone) is considered one of the hardest to produce (Hendry, 2023). The research was guided by the following research question: can TTS-S help L2 learners raise their sound awareness and improve their perception and production of the target Mandarin tones over six weeks? By means of pre-/post-tests (to assess effectiveness in pronunciation), ten beginner-level participants were asked to complete: (1) an awareness task in which they verbalize their metacognitive knowledge of Mandarin tones; (2) ABX tasks to assess their perception of Mandarin tones; and (3) a production task to evaluate the production of the target tones. Results indicate that the use of TTS-S did not yield significant enhancements in terms of awareness, perception, and production, possibly due to the presence of a ceiling effect in some of the measures adopted and other methodological limitations.