"Intonex - French pronounciation exercises for English-speaking students"

Supervised by P.Green

Abstract

This project is based on the work of a native french student at the University of Sheffield, Christine Fiandino, involved in a PhD entitled « Setting up a CD-ROM to learn French pronunciation ». As she had the occasion to observe through a survey she led on a set of French teachers in several universities, « intonation often does not receive the attention it deserves » [1].

The principal aim of this project is to use computer-aided learning to provide students with more interactive exercises, taking advantage of the computer's ability to deal with multimedia, and especially with sound inputs and outputs. The original idea was to use computational and mathematical resources on speech recognition to allow students to record sentences. The goal of the project would then be to analyse these recordings, providing students with feedback, in order for them to improve their intonation.

Thus, this project contains two different types of exercises : first , text-oriented exercises, presented through a web site, teaching the students important rules in french pronunciation and secondly, sound-oriented exercises, based on a pitch tracker, allowing the students to record their voices and to match their samples with pre-recorded ones.